FEBRUARY 2, 1959

5

following—none of which are disputed by the Admin-
istration:

► With total productivity a fraction of ours (though growing at least twice as fast), the Russians certainly have not spent less on defense annually than we have, over the past decade, and may now be spending more.

► It is clearly the Soviet intention to maintain a defense establishment superior to ours if they can.

► They set out on this course, more than 10 years ago, by keeping conventional ground and tactical air forces overwhelmingly superior to ours and those of our allies combined; when we countered by building our "air-atomic" power to great strength and evolved the "deterrent" strategy of threatened "massive retaliation" they resorted to building a "deterrent" nuclear force of their own, based upon hydrogen bombs, long-range jet bombers, an anti-aircraft missile defense, and civil defense planning far in excess of our own rudimentary provisions: also, five to seven years ahead of us, they em-barked on a full-scale long-range missile development and production program.

► As a result of the earlier Soviet shift to missiles, a missile "gap" is unmistakable. There can be debate about its full meaning, but one fact cannot be disputed. What-ever our intelligence of their strategic establishments amounted to in the past (and their *advantage* in intelligence owing to the greater openness of our society has never been questioned), because missile launching sites do not require the elaborate installations of bomber bases —and *can be far more easily camouflaged and feigned*— our intelligence is deteriorating.

► The ultimate balance of military power ("the delicate balance of terror") must eventually rest upon missile capability, and in progress toward this capability the Russians are ahead of us—decisively in the case of IRBM's, perhaps marginally in the case of ICBM's.

► The Administration is relying upon the ability of our bomber force to survive Russian missiles, offensive and defensive, in sufficient strength to pose a deterrent threat of "destroying" Russia (aided, it is true, by the modest force of US ICBM's now programmed), to maintain the balance. But the USSR is clearly intent upon building an ICBM force that can destroy both SAC's bases and the population and industry of the US. Against such a missile force there is no real defense, either now or in the visible future, while in the competition of threatened terror the odds overwhelmingly favor the newer weapons.

These considerations, impressionistic as they must be in sum, are sufficient to convince us that all is *not* well, and to suggest that the President's choice of giving first priority to the fight against inflation is a choice full of dangers for the United States.

# Labor Morality

LABOR REFORM appears to be a good bet as the subject most likely to succeed in the first session of the new Congress. Already the battle is joined with Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts having introduced virtually the same bill that won 88-1 approval in the Senate last year and Senator Goldwater of Arizona having introduced the Administration bill. Kennedy's measure has as its major co-sponsor this year Senator Ervin of North Carolina, prompting "observers" to comment that it's a bipartisan bill—it represents both parts of the Democratic Party.

Basically the Kennedy-Ervin bill requires secret-ballot elections for union officers, prohibits convicted felons from serving as union officials, and calls for various financial reports to the Department of Labor. It is also aimed at preventing employer-union collusion and contains modest amendments to Taft-Hartley.

As with all measures that seek to legislate morality there is a certain amount of cynicism involved. Congressional Democrats hope to push the bill as a demonstration of their independence of labor's political influence, while Republicans want to hold it up until either they or events can muster the force for a more punitive measure. Passage of the Kennedy bill would be a minor inconvenience to Jimmy Hoffa and would make an honest woman of the building trades organizations. Basically, however, the morality of the trade union movement would remain what the officers make it.

# Lyndon Steps Forward

THANKS to the Majority Leader of the Senate, there is a better than even chance that Congress this year will take another modest step forward on civil rights. And in the process of considering the four-point program Lyndon Johnson has proposed—and will use his not incon siderable influence to pass—those who would take stronger action will at least have an opportunity to put their position on the record in this session. (The chance of bringing a civil rights bill up for action was practically non-existent—thanks to Rule 22—before Johnson made the issue a "must" for this year.)

The Majority Leader's self-styled modest proposal would extend the life of the Civil Rights Commission, which expires next September, until January, 1961, and give the US Attorney General specific authority to deal with "hate" bombings. It moves in an interesting "new direction" in calling for establishment of a "Community Relations Service," along the lines of the Federal Media tion Board in the labor-management field, to "keep people in communication with each other" when civil rights controversies paralyze a community. (The Montgomery bus strike and the Norfolk school shutdown

6

THE NEW REPUBLIC

would presumably be cases in point.) And, most important, it would grant the Attorney General subpoena powers in voting rights cases. "I voted for the Civil Rights Bill [of 1957]," Johnson told the Senate, "because I believe that the right to vote is the most important instrument for securing justice and steps were needed to safeguard that right. . . . If there are loopholes [in that law] I believe they should be plugged, and we are told that one of the loopholes is the fact that the Attorney General does not have subpoena powers under the voting rights laws."

The experience of US Attorneys with voting registrars in Alabama is proof enough that the holes exist—and the startling difference in the treatment accorded Negroes in Southern cities and towns where Negroes vote and in those where they do not demonstrate that the vote is fundamental to all other lasting civil rights reform. A step which would advance enforcement of the right to vote is not a contribution to be scorned because it is less than a full guarantee of equal civil rights, for it is basic.

Of course, there is more to be done—by amendment of the Johnson bill in the present Congress if possible. The subpoena power in voting cases should be extended to include all cases in violation of civil rights—and certainly to those involving school desegregation. And some clear expression of Congressional endorsement of the Supreme Court's decisions in the school cases is badly needed to exert moral force on those inclined to follow Faubus and Almond.

But the mere act of taking a second—small—step on civil rights without a filibuster is a habit to be encouraged in the Congress.

## "Isn't It Clear
We Have Justice?"

Havana

MOST CUBANS, still flushed with the euphoria of successful rebellion, cannot understand what went wrong with "Operación Verdad" (Operation Truth). To them, the monster opening session of the Havana trials of "war criminals" seemed certain proof to the world that all the drumhead executions were fully justified and that not one innocent person had been or would be shot by the firing squads.

Castro's brother, Raul, military commander at the other end of the island but in Havana for the benefit of visiting newsmen, had misgivings in advance. He is known to have complained privately that the scheduled trial of Major Jesus Sosa Blanco in the huge circular Havana Sports Palace would be like a gladiatorial combat in the Colosseum of ancient Rome. Raul tried in vain to get the plan changed; failing that, he refused to attend.

Raul's fears were realized. When the crowd of 17,000 began chanting "Kill him! Kill him!" the presiding judge warned that the trial must not be turned into a Roman circus. A few minutes later, when the handcuffed career army officer

was brought into the arena by guards bearing submachine guns, the same figure suggested itself to him. "My words will not be believed by anyone," he said, "I am here in a Roman Colosseum."

The crowd continued to chant "Kill him!" from time to time and hissed the defense attorney repeatedly when he brought out that most of the 45 witnesses had nothing but hearsay evidence to offer. Only two, or possibly three, witnesses had seen the acts of murder, theft and arson they described in shrieking tones. But most Cubans saw nothing wrong. Everywhere the proud question was asked, "Now that you've seen our public trial, isn't it clear that we have justice in Cuba?"

It was not at all clear to most of the 80-odd newsmen Fidel Castro had flown from the United States with all expenses paid to see the "war crimes" trials in action. Nor was it clear to some of the more than 200 other newsmen from Mexico, Central and South America.

Faced with criticism or even with a few specific questions, Cubans typically showed deep hurt, saying, "You said they didn't have enough trial; now you complain that they have too much."

HOWEVER, Cuba's mad excitement overshadows a sturdy and coherent idealism that characterized Castro's rebellion during the two years his forces defied Batista in the mountains of Oriente Province. Batista supporters now awaiting trial attest to the fact that Castro's rebels waged war fairly. They gave medical care to enemy wounded and spared those who surrendered, holding them prisoner or in many cases turning them loose without their rifles and boots.

The one serious black mark against them is the series of terrorist bombings in which innocent persons were maimed or killed in a night club, a ten-cent store and a department store to demonstrate that the Batista government could not maintain law and order. Some of those atrocities were doubtless the unauthorized work of student bomb carriers, but Castro's rebellion cannot disclaim responsibility entirely.

The rebels did avoid the torture and mutilation of bodies that often are standard means of extracting information and dealing with those who inform to the enemy.

Now that he is in power, Castro insists on a completely free press even though angry and hurt at American criticism of the executions. Not one correspondent has been deported—not even those North Americans accused of taking money from the Batista regime—and not one newspaper or magazine has been barred from distribution for critical articles or cartoons. But this very highmindedness carries with it a special problem. The victors are so convinced that Batista was all bad and that they were all good that they now seem to regard any harm done by the Cuban army as a war crime.

With the decision to have no more spectacle trials in the Sports Palace and to permit press coverage but bar radio and television and the general public, the trials promise to lose their Roman circus atmosphere. The test of their fairness will come when most newsmen have gone home and the second-string defendants come before the revolutionary courts. They are the ones for whom procedural guarantees are important, the ones who may have been merely following reasonable orders.

RICHARD DUDMAN

FEBRUARY 2, 1959

7

Mikoyan—Plus and Minus

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS after Mikoyan returned to Moscow, he held the first Moscow news conference he had held in many months. It represented a habit he had picked up somewhere between Cleveland and Los Angeles. Mikoyan said many favorable things about America and Americans—duly printed in Soviet newspapers, whose readers found them unfamiliar. His visit to a Washington suburban supermarket was chronicled on film for Moscow television—and that was unusual; Soviet viewers had seldom before been allowed even a fleeting glimpse of American abundance.

It remains to be seen how much more of Mikoyan's newly-acquired and occasionally benevolent expertise will filter down to the Russian *narod*. But more important, in the view of some State Department people, are the impressions Mikoyan carried back himself, to be shared with his colleagues. Some of the Department's specialists on the Soviet Union have long urged that the welcome mat be put out for Russian leaders, arguing that the more these men know about the US, the better. The Mikoyan visit did much to sustain this view.

Nearly all the editorial pages of newspapers in cities the Soviet Deputy Premier visited touched on the less savory chapters of his biography, but most of them wound up extending him a more or less cordial invitation to see the local sights. Some elements of the Fourth Estate, it is true, did act as if he were staging a frontal assault on Fort Knox and the 1960 elections. One syndicated article, for example, suggested that the Russian cameras covering his visit to a supermarket were really trained on a nearby naval installation. And *Time*, scoring the daily press coverage of the trip, seemed to imply that reporters should have alternated paragraphs on the Hungarian revolt with details of what Mikoyan saw in Macy's.

But to say that Mikoyan's public-relations operation did not commend itself to all journalists and did not sweep the country into a mood of appeasement is not to gainsay the brilliance of its conception and execution. His original stated purpose in coming here was to spend a pleasant vacation, and perhaps talk a little trade, with his old friend Ambassador Menshikov, the old Bolshevik.

But as soon as his visa had been granted, the Soviet Embassy in Washington began adding to the profits of the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company. Long-distance calls were directed to a number of American businessmen, all of them endowed with impeccable social and political backgrounds, and all of them, as it happened, recent visitors to Moscow, where they had

received cordial official hospitality. These gentlemen were given to understand that should they now elect to return that hospitality, Mr. Mikoyan might be disposed to include their cities in his itinerary.

Thus did he obtain entree to a succession of opulent brownstone clubs whose carpets had never before known Communist boots. His host in Cleveland, Cyrus Eaton, was a controversial figure whose activities might be thought to have alienated some Ohio Republicans; but a local paper, reporting Eaton's Union League Club lunch for Mikoyan, ventured the guess that never before in history had so much of the city's power and wealth been represented around a table.

To each of these select groups, Mikoyan's message was the same: the Cold War is a bad thing; the United States is responsible, but that is unpleasant so let's not talk about it; businessmen are more sensible than diplomats, so let's get down to business.

THE EVIDENCE that a Kremlin leader could be human and even humorous came as a revelation to some in his audiences. And understandably. Can anyone imagine Molotov hamming it up with Jerry Lewis, or Gromyko deliriously operating the controls of a retractable hardtop at River Rouge? But Jerry Lewis will not now turn out motion pictures dedicated to socialist realism; there has been no cry for nationalism from the Ford workers; no sign that the laughs Mikoyan drew have really shaken the foundations of the Republic. It might be just as well to take the Republic for granted and speculate instead on its impact on Mr. Mikoyan.

In Maryland, he asked the man who showed him around a modest motel if the establishment was owned by a company. No, said his guide, I own it.

A Washington housewife apologized for a barren larder, explaining that she was waiting for bargains before stocking up. Mikoyan, at the time, was peering into her deep freeze at six steaks and other packages.

In two industrial plants, he inquired if the managements needed more orders. No, he was told, the plants were committed for the next 18 months at full capacity.

In Chicago, he visited the home of a $100-a-week bus driver who is a Republican and admires Mr. Dulles.

The newsmen who watched these encounters felt that Mikoyan would go home still an adversary, but a wiser and more understanding adversary. For the first time in 40 years of Soviet history, one of Russia's top leaders has intimate first-hand experience of the US. It will stand him, and perhaps us, in good stead.

PAUL NIVEN

8

THE NEW REPUBLIC

# Atlanta Is Different

## Fourth in a Series on Southerners and Schools

by HELEN FULLER

THE MANNER in which the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals and a special Federal District Court in Norfolk chose to celebrate Robert E. Lee's birthday this year (January 19) has changed things for the South.

The "little bit of integration" which will surely result from the orders outlawing the Virginia brand of "massive resistance" to the 1954 Supreme Court decision on segregation in the schools will make compliance easier in the states where that has been the course. North Carolina and Tennessee will be relieved of jeers from their neighbors about their faithlessness to the white man's cause. (Only a few weeks ago former Governor Tuck of Virginia was expressing public sympathy for the poor people of North Carolina whose leaders lacked the gumption to stand up to the Supreme Court as Senator Byrd and Governor Almond were doing.) And additional towns and cities in those states will be willing to try "token" integration if Norfolk and Charlottesville and Alexandria are trying it too.

Farther south, also, this can happen. The considerable sentiment for integrating a "pilot school" to test limited "voluntary" desegregation which already existed in Miami, Florida, is strengthened. Gov. Leroy Collins has warned that the state's pupil assignment law won't stand up in the courts forever if it is used to bar Negroes from white schools completely. "We must be prepared to accept some desegregation, somewhere, sometime," says the Governor who has visions of representing the moderate South on a national Democratic ticket. And the cosmopolitan community of Miami, led by men who know that racial tensions can be bad for business, may decide to make the sacrifice. What has happened in Virginia should make that decision easier to swallow for the majority of Miamians who oppose integration but want a peaceful, prosperous community.

But the January 19 Virginia court decisions will not temper defiance in the other five Confederate states which have refused, along with the Old Dominion, to take one voluntary step to obey the Supreme Court. Too many political lives are now staked on keeping schools segregated. The new young Governors Georgia and Alabama

inaugurated this month won out in contests during which extravagant promises were made. (Georgia's Ernest Vandiver even pledged to use state troopers and guardsmen to keep the schools segregated after his opponent seemed to be causing trouble with the charge that Vandiver was "soft on segregation"; Vandiver, he said, had permitted Negroes and whites to be served barbecue in the same line at a political rally in Thomason.)

This year's campaign for Governor of Louisiana, with the leader of the White Citizens' Councils, State Sen. W. M. Rainach, as the man to beat, will be in the same groove. And both Senators Sparkman (Ala.) and Russell (Ga.) know what could happen to them in 1960 if they display the slightest doubt that it is better to close the schools than desegregate them. (Former Gov. Marvin Griffin, who did so much to egg on Orval Faubus, is searching for grounds on which to challenge Russell.)

It is politically necessary for defiance to go on in the Deep South. But the January 19 decisions in Virginia leave only one way open—a hard way. The laws passed since 1954 to give Southern Governors the power to close individual schools rather than desegregate them when ordered are now useless. To close one school without closing all is to deny some children their right to equal protection under the 14th Amendment, the federal Court has ruled. All that is left to try is the far more difficult expedient of creating a "private" segregated system of schools to take the place of the public ones. In the case of Virginia the Court has ruled that the state must maintain unsegregated public schools (how adequately supported is another matter), but it also grants the right of a state to make tuition grants to pupils who prefer to attend other schools (including segregated ones) provided that the funds for those grants are appropriated especially for this purpose and not taken from public school monies.

Georgia's new Governor was ready with bills to put such a system in operation—complete with tax deduction privileges for those who contribute to private education—the day the Virginia opinion was announced. (A team of Georgia lawyers had been conferring with officials in Richmond beforehand.) The "private" school tuition grant is undoubtedly to be the South's new second line of defense now that the battle of Richmond is lost.

For states like Mississippi, South Carolina and Ala-

HELEN FULLER, a Southerner by birth and education, has just returned from a survey through the Southern states. This is the fourth of several interpretive reports.

FEBRUARY 2, 1959

9

bama there is no particular hurry in preparing the new
position. Thanks to the restraint of the NAACP, hard-
core black belt areas are not the object of early suits to
force school desegregation. White leaders there have
plenty of time to plug away at the larger tasks of build-
ing sympathy for their point of view on race matters in
the North, East and West, blocking support for the Su-
preme Court school opinion in Congress, and preparing
the ground for a strong states rights third-party effort
in 1960 (see NR, January 26, 1959).

But it is much later in Georgia and Louisiana, where
federal court orders to admit Negroes to white schools
in Atlanta and New Orleans are expected before the new
term begins next September. In both places the emer-
gency could be met with comparative ease by rescinding
laws restricting state support to segregated schools and
allowing the two cities to decide for themselves whether
to shut their schools or take in a few Negroes. But in
both places, although the opposition would not be in-
considerable, the likelihood is that the schools would
remain in operation if there were a referendum on the
question of desegregated schools or no public schools.
And for that reason there is no inclination in the capi-
tals of either state to take the local option way out. No
other Georgia or Louisiana city, town or hamlet would
vote as Atlanta and New Orleans might today. But one
small instance of integration, the politicians have learned,
lets the steam out of the whole issue—not with a whoosh,
but by slow leak. (Just look at North Carolina and
Tennessee!)

For practical reasons, therefore, Deep South politicians
cannot back down before 1960. For such equally practi-
cal reasons as money, buildings, teachers and taxpayers
suits it is hard to imagine anything like a workable
system of segregated private schools ready for operation
in Atlanta and New Orleans by the time the courts
have ordered them to cease operating segregated public
schools. And the practical result can only be that more
than 100,000 children (1/3 Negroes) in Atlanta and
86,000 (more than 1/2 Negroes) in New Orleans may
find themselves without schools next year, as Virginia
children have this year. That is, unless the cities affected
can force the states to cut them free from the laws which
require defiance to the bitter end.

ATLANTA is the first Southern city to become greatly
exercised about the possible loss of its schools far
ahead of the time it might occur. Virginia, remem-
ber, was not concerned until after the fact. But though
the decision of the Federal District Court in *Calhoun
v Latimer, et al*, the case testing segregation in Atlanta
public schools, will come late next summer at the earli-
est, the subject of the schools was already the number-
one news story in Atlanta last November.

The reasons are several. Most important is the fact
that Atlanta has—and has had for 22 years—a mayor

with remarkable foresight. Bill Hartsfield has made
Atlanta the leading city of the region—replacing Rich-
mond, the recognized Southern capital for so long—by
anticipating what roads, schools, parks, airports and other
facilities were required to make it so and arousing in its
citizens the same pride he feels in the city. He can see
ahead now to what Atlanta would be like if its schools
were shut down, and he does not intend to have his fifth
—and probably final—term as mayor end on a sour note,
if there is any way to prevent it. He has taken pride too
in the fact that race relations are admittedly better in
Atlanta than elsewhere in the Deep South. Rural
Georgians who have moved to Atlanta and industrial
jobs in recent years, however, resent the mayor's in-
sistence on fair play for the Negro and expressed their
hostility in his last re-election. Hartsfield won his 1957
primary by only 3,000 votes. Many times that number
of Negro votes were cast—and Hartsfield was solid in
Negro wards. Some human gratitude may underlie his
concern that Atlanta consider the school question coolly.

A good chance to start the city thinking early came
when a local lawyer, Morton Rolleston, Jr., ventured the
opinion last November that Atlanta should be preparing
to sell her school buildings to private parties in line with
state plans to prevent desegregation. Months in advance
of the time he had expected an open move to abolish the
schools, the mayor was ready with a prompt and pithy
answer. Closing the schools was unthinkable, he said,
and Atlantans should have a chance to vote on whether
they wanted public schools (desegregated) or no public
schools.

The mayor's blast at Rolleston set off bursts of fire in
his support. His years of good government have built
up reservoirs of public confidence. So it was not the job
it would have been in most cities to organize the mani-
festoes of support for Hartsfield's position which quickly
came from 311 ministers and rabbis, 419 Atlanta doctors,
two-thirds of the Emory University faculty, Agnes Scott
professors, the local chapter of the Scientific Research
Society of America and Parent-Teacher Associations all
over the city.

Few communities have so effective a group of public-
minded professionals to rally them in time of need. In
almost daily touch with one another in their regular
businesses of the law, journalism, merchandising, adver-
tising, banking, social work, the ministry and education,
their lines of communication extend to Negro leaders
of the city as well as City Hall. "You hear a lot about
the closing of the lines of communication between the
races since 1954," one Negro leader says, "but it isn't
true here. Even if the schools were closed I don't think
the existing channels for bringing white and Negro
leaders together when needed would be broken. Some
superficial ones would be. We might not be meeting with
the church ladies so often to discuss race relations, but
with the experienced and sophisticated whites we have

10

THE NEW REPUBLIC

moved into a deeper level of communication that would last."

Atlanta opinion makers, now alerting the city to the danger to the schools while there is still time to protest, have far more positive forces to work with than a similar group—if it existed—would have in any other Southern city. In Editor Ralph McGill and the *Atlanta Constitution* the city has a constructive voice almost unique in the South. McGill's front-page editorials after May, 1954, were the first to warn where massive resistance would lead. They are still about the wisest, most illuminating writing one can read in the South—and the most comforting to the much-abused Southern moderates who, McGill says, will rise again. ("They have learned the difference between frustration and defeat.")

The city of Atlanta, like the state, has an uncommon interest and pride in its educational system. Since the early days of this century when public education was exceedingly meager, progress has been great in Georgia. Fifty-three percent of the total state budget now goes for schools. This amounts to three times as much for schools as Georgia's total budget 15 years ago, and local expenditures are on top of that. State money pays only one-third of Atlanta's school bill; the balance is financed from local taxes. So large an investment is not tossed away lightly.

The fact that Atlanta is a hub city, with thousands of branch offices and a daily flood of visitors from other states with non-Southern ways gives it metropolitan values. ("People are always coming through Atlanta on the way to some other place. But you have to deliberately set out to go to Birmingham and Nashville and Memphis.") Atlanta, under Mayor Hartsfield, has courted the outsiders—for their trade—even when this has meant some bending of local custom. (Georgia laws forbid the sale of mixed drinks in public places, but Atlanta's better hotels serve cocktails without subterfuge. The "woolhat" boys in the legislature make a big to-do about it every year or so, but Mayor Hartsfield says how can you expect Big City people to bring their conventions to Atlanta unless it acts like the regional capital it is?)

As a university center for more than 50 years, Atlanta has a large pool of high-quality Negro leadership.

These educated men and women create a different, more acceptable image of the Negro than white people in most other Southern cities see. A Negro professor of history was elected over a white candidate to the Atlanta City Democratic Committee not long ago. Due to the pioneering of men like A. T. Walden, who began the practice of law in the city 40 years ago when Negroes were not even welcome in the courtrooms, strong inter-racial business contacts exist. Negro executives of the Citizens' Trust Company, working with fellow members of the Federal Reserve System in leading white banks like the Fulton National and First National, have nego-

tiated financing for millions of dollars worth of Negro housing. Atlanta Life and Southeastern Fidelity, two large Negro insurance companies, have helped obtain more such mortgages through their contacts with white companies in the same fields.

All of these forces are working to save the public schools by persuading the legislature to cut Fulton County free from state laws which prevent compliance with the Supreme Court. But the strongest potential force in the community has not chosen to make itself felt. The so-called "power structure"—the name commonly applied to the ruling business groups by the knowing ones in every Southern city—has not had the urge to assert its political power on behalf of the schools. The Mayor has called more than one meeting of the financial giants—Georgia Power, Coca-Cola, Rich's Department Store, Ford and General Motors branch managers, and the bankers and insurance mortgagers—to try to arouse them to head off the crisis in the schools, but though agreeing about the damage that closing the schools would do, they claim that their former political influence with the state government has evaporated.

True, they say, they once had enormous power over elected officials through the legal retainers and campaign contributions they conferred. But that was when Georgia's Governors in the 'thirties had to run the state on a budget of $30 million. Today's Governor has access to well over $300 million per year, generated by sales taxes and the new prosperity of the region, and is not dependent upon the "power structure" as his predecessors were. But it is also true that when its influence was at its height the "power structure" was reluctant to test it in the field of race relations.

Nevertheless, the present campaign to rally the city to the support of the schools has produced impressive results. By good publicity techniques, for example, a routine speech to the PTA of Spring Street Elementary School was turned into the kickoff of a sizable "Save Our Schools" movement. Two days after Hartsfield's initial attack on the "sell the schools" proposal, Fulton County Representative M. M. ('Muggsy') Smith, a beloved Georgia Tech football star 30 years ago and a Presbyterian deacon ever since, told an audience which overflowed the school auditorium why he agreed with the mayor and would fight for local option in the legislature. His words were on every radio and television station an hour later, and hundreds of "We Want Public Schools" stickers were ready for the audience to paste on their cars that night. The next morning, mothers from neighborhoods all over Atlanta gathered downtown to plan rallies in their schools similar to Spring Street's. Someone had been alert enough to have pamphlet reprints of 'Muggsy' Smith's speech of the night before ready by 10 a.m. for the ladies to take home and distribute.

The spark has spread in Atlanta. The Fulton County grand jury called on the Chamber of Commerce to set

FEBRUARY 2, 1959

11

up a bi-racial commission to ease the tensions which are likely to grow as time for the school segregation decision approaches. The Chamber says it is not the proper body to do so. But a dozen civic groups have now joined to create such an interracial citizens' committee in the near future.

Concern for Atlanta's schools, however, stops at the Fulton County line. The war between Atlanta and the state of Georgia assures the city of little sympathy or consideration at the Capitol. Under the Georgia County Unit System, Fulton County with its 571,600 people has no more power in state affairs than Troup County, with a population of 54,700.

Since 1917, votes cast in each of Georgia's 159 counties are counted under a system which gives the average voter outside of Fulton County 11.5 times as much voting

power as a resident of Fulton. And as more Georgians move from the rural areas to the city the inequality becomes even greater. (In 1920 Fulton County contained 8 percent of the total population of Georgia but wielded only 1.5 percent of the voting power; in 1948 Fulton had 14.6 percent of the population, but still only 1.5 percent of the voting power.)

Governor Vandiver and Senators Russell (his uncle by marriage) and Talmadge (his associate in business) can afford to ignore Atlanta's wishes and preserve the segregation issue for 1960, and it seems that this is what they intend to do.

*(How New Orleans is lining up on segregation and the schools is the subject of the next article in this series.)*

# The Newsmagazines
## I—U. S. News and World Report

by BEN H. BAGDIKIAN

EACH WEEK a politically crucial bloc of American voters—perhaps as many as 10 million men and women—have arranged before their eyes a neatly reconstructed picture of the nation and the world. This arrangement is through the pages of the Big Three among newsmagazines: *Time*, *Newsweek* and *U.S. News and World Report*.

Each magazine tells its readers it is devoted mainly to news.

*Time's* subtitle is: "The Weekly Newsmagazine."

*Newsweek's* name is augmented by its motto: "A Well-Informed Public Is America's Greatest Security."

And the encyclopedic title, *U.S. News & World Report*, is embellished with the legend: "The Complete News Magazine."

The 4 million copies of newsmagazines that are picked off newsstands and delivered by mailmen go into homes and are read chiefly for what they have to report of the news of the world. But their function is not the same as newspapers. The 58 million copies of newspapers that circulate every day among Americans record as quickly as possible the hard bricks of events flying through the air minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, and day-by-day.

BEN H. BAGDIKIAN is a reporter on The Providence Journal-Bulletin in which his study of the news-magazines originally appeared.

The magazines look back at the end of the week, pick up the random blocks where they lie, rearrange them into an architecture, add their own backdrops, landscaping, climate and sound effects.

How accurate is this weekly re-creation? How close to real life does it look a year afterward, five years afterward? How often are the bricks placed where they fit? How often are they left alone when, for the moment, they don't seem to fit anywhere? How often are the bricks of real events reshaped to build a scene more comforting to the public eye or more satisfying to a publisher's taste than the scenery of real life?

It is one of the ironies of the Big Three newsmagazines that the proprietor with a reputation for the most extreme political bias — David Lawrence — publishes a newsmagazine with a reputation for being the least biased of the three—*U.S. News & World Report*.

How justified is that reputation?

On the last page of *U.S. News & World Report* one finds in small print: "This page presents the opinions of the Editor." A study of six months of *U.S. News & World Report* shows that these opinions run to the need to expel Russia from the United Nations and attack it militarily, the "illegality" (his quotation marks) of the Supreme Court decision on racial integration, the dangers of "New Deal experimentalism," the "dictatorship"

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of big unions, the "immorality" of stopping H-bomb
tests, and the general perfidy of the Kremlin and left-
wing Supreme Court justices.

On this same page is printed another sentence:

"The news pages are written by other staff members independently of these editorial views."

Are they?

One newspaper editor, answering a poll, referred to "Lawrence's reactionary weekly." Yet the survey of 144 editorial page editors, by Carol Donley of the Department of Journalism, University of Wyoming, resulted in easy first place in usefulness for Lawrence's magazine. *Time* was a poor second, *Newsweek* third.

This kind of recognition must be a source of deep
satisfaction to the 69-year-old editor. The son of poor
immigrants, he worked his way through Princeton as an
Associated Press campus reporter, developed a close rela-
tionship with college president Woodrow Wilson. When
Wilson went to the White House, this relationship made
Lawrence a leading political reporter.

It is, perhaps, typical of Lawrence that he sacrificed
this valuable professional contact and personal friendship
by reporting—because he thought it important news—
that Wilson had suffered a stroke that impaired his
abilities.

Lawrence became a financial reporter, started a syndi-
cate, and in 1926 began a rather dreary daily report of
government decisions and announcements called *U.S.
Daily*. At the same time, he wrote an increasingly con-
servative daily column (it now appears in 250 daily
papers). While a former employee, Drew Pearson, and
friends Walter Lippmann and Joseph Alsop were com-
menting more or less sympathetically on the New Deal
in the '30s, Lawrence became known as one of the most
conservative commentators in the trade. By 1940 he had
considerable wealth and put much of it into the new
*U.S. News*, forerunner of the present magazine. *U.S.
News* had no visible bias. Ten years ago he married it to
*World Report*, and a bias, or point of view, began to be
evident to many. It became successful from that time on.
The circulation was 364,000 in 1951, went to 922,000
in 1957, is thought to be more than one million today.
This is about the same as *Newsweek*, half as much as
*Time*. It is believed that *U.S. News & World Report*
could make two or three times its present profits if it
did not pour so much into news space. But its growth
certainly is related to this generous allocation of space
to the reader. (Lawrence's 60-percent interest is held in
trust, will go on his death to the employees, who already
own 40 percent.)

Among the features of this growing giant are:

► Lengthy tape-recorded interviews with important news sources, printed verbatim in question-and-answer form without comment.

► Generous use of full texts of important public

declarations, speeches by politicians, and other spoken
news, also without comment within the text. These plus
the interviews may constitute as much as one-third of
any one issue.

► Competent, on-the-scene reports by the magazine's correspondents.

► Full-scale analytical pieces on a single theme, with heavy emphasis on economic reporting

► Outstanding use of graphic illustration to clarify economic and other complex news.

These all include many presentations plainly contrary to the opinions of David Lawrence himself.

In terms of quantity of reporting, *U.S. News & World Report* is far ahead of its two major competitors. In 1957 it averaged 90 pages a week of news, double *Time* and *Newsweek*. In the first six months of 1958 it printed 297 pages on business outlook (*Newsweek*, 82; *Time*, 36); 103 pages on education (*Time* and *Newsweek* each 34 pages); and 91 pages on science and space (*Newsweek*, 74; *Time*, 54). Total news pages so far this year average 69 pages a week for *U.S. News & World Report*, 52 for *Newsweek*, and 46 for *Time*.

THIS by itself is no measure of net value to the reader. *Time* and *Newsweek* summarize, which could conceivably be more useful than the lengthy primary documents published by *U.S. News & World Report*. And *Time* and *Newsweek* devote considerable space to cultural-intellectual-entertainment life, but *U.S. News & World Report* almost none.

But for political and economic reporting, *Time* and
*Newsweek* plainly are outdistanced in space and detail
by their younger rival. A study at the University of
Syracuse School of Journalism of the 1956 political cam-
paign showed that *Time* printed 34,000 words of cam-
paign news, *Newsweek* some 14,000 and *U.S. News &
World Report* 150,000 words. Searching for bias, the
survey said *Time's* words were 75 percent biased toward
the Republicans, *Newsweek's* 28 percent toward the
Republicans, *U.S. News & World Report* only one per-
cent toward the Republicans, the rest neutral.

But this study evidently looked only for editorially
inserted words of bias. *U.S. News & World Report* deals
heavily in exact reproduction of the words of others. The
Syracuse survey did not measure a pertinent factor: how
balanced and fair was the selection of persons whose
words were accurately reported? And in what editorial
surroundings were these words placed?

A study of 1958's *U.S. News & World Report* shows
that it uses sources who are individually legitimate and
interesting focal points of news and opinion. But it also
shows that taken together they do not form a balanced
picture of informed opinion.

In the first six months of 1958, for example, there

FEBRUARY 2, 1959

13

were verbatim interviews with 27 representatives of large corporations. There were almost none from labor or the opposite wing of domestic economics. On auto-workers' demands there were textual reprints from heads of the car manufacturing corporations, none from the union. On prices, wages and profits there were full texts from Harlow Curtice, head of General Motors; Roger M. Blough, chairman of US Steel; and Benjamin F. Fairless, president of the American Iron and Steel Institute; but none from the opposite side.

Where the magazine searched out unusual sources, they tended to be on the side of the editor's opinions. For example, on March 21, 1958, the magazine re-printed as news the monthly newsletter of the First National City Bank of New York. Its message was that Germany is more prosperous than England because Ger-many has a free enterprise economy and England a semi-socialist one. No presentation was made of the obvious additional or even contrary factors in understanding the two economies.

Politically, the personalities and space are biased to-ward the Lawrence view. Of speech texts from 12 politi-cians, 11 are conservatives or conservative-moderates. (Styles Bridges, Harry Byrd, Lyndon Johnson, John Stennis) and only one (Hubert Humphrey) from the other side of the Congressional spectrum.

On January 21 a series of texts on the '58 political campaign formed a Republican-versus-Democratic debate by way of speeches selected by the editors. The three Republicans (President Eisenhower, Nixon and Sherman Adams) started off with three and three-tenths pages; the three Democrats (Sam Rayburn, Humphrey and Dean Acheson) were at the end with seven-tenths of one page, or only 18 percent of the total space for that feature.

This is not to say that anti-Lawrence opinions are excluded. In actual wordage, there are probably more in *U.S. News & World Report* than in *Time, Newsweek*, or, indeed, in the liberal *New Republic* and *The Nation*. But in balance and net impact, the total effect is heavily weighted in his favor. This weight is enhanced by edi-torial handling of otherwise neutral or unbiased report-age. For example, on May 23 the issue was devoted to the cover theme: **COMMUNISTS FORCING SHOWDOWN?** To carry out this Lawrentian theme, it was necessary to torture much of the first-rate material that did not fit the editorial mold. There was no evidence of fiddling with reports themselves, only their immersion in contrary surroundings.

This was the week of the Latin American mobs attack-ing Vice President Nixon and of the French Army revolt in Algeria. The lead introduction said: "Violence flared last week on four continents. . . . Back of almost all of it was Communist direction." Yet, it was plain that the French Army revolt was not Communist inspired. And Vice President Nixon was the first to say that Commu-nism was not the basic explanation for the mobs in Latin

America. In fact, these points were borne out by the reports of the magazine's own correspondents.

Over the first-hand story of Robert Kleiman, *U.S. News & World Report* correspondent, the magazine headline read: "Communist-supplied arms . . . played a major part. Communist political tactics in Paris played still another role. It was in this situation that French officers finally rebelled. . . ." But the story this headline described made almost the opposite point. Kleiman made much of "intimidation by right-wing leaders. . . ." The only material in his story the headline could refer to was one sentence in the 17th paragraph: "To win the Algerian war, General Massu maintained that the flow of rebel arms from neighboring Tunisia must be halted. Some of these arms come from Communist sources." A boxed display thrust into the midst of the Kleiman report announced: "TREND OF CONFLICT: Rebel attacks have been increasing recently, as Communist arms flowed in from next-door Tunisia. . . .

EVEN in the standing feature, "Business Around the World," the theme was "supported" by: "Busy as their firebrands are with brickbats, the Communists still have time to poke around in the trouble spots of the business world. . . ." Fifteen lines later it added that Communist-bloc nations may not be aiming primarily at weakening Western markets so much as getting rid of their own surplus problems.

The bristling supernationalism of Lawrence appears in a dramatic display on Page 43 entitled: "When US Is Insulted Now and 44 Years Ago." It noted that 44 years ago when Mexico arrested seven American sailors and then refused to apologize or to raise the US flag and give it a 21-gun salute, American soldiers invaded Mexico and occupied Vera Cruz for seven months. The display then reported that by contrast when the Vice President was spat on by mobs, American soldiers were sent only to nearby countries, not right into Venezuela.

The magazine repeated the theme again on September 5, 1958, in an article on the murder by Iraq mobs of three Americans. It printed a two-thirds-of-a-page dis-play recalling 19th Century American enforcement of payments by other countries, with the title-"In the Past: When Americans Have Been Killed Or Attacked Abroad—"

The theme: **COMMUNISTS FORCING SHOWDOWN?** is over another piece of text that does not support it:

On the spot, in South America, the answers come quickly from leaders, from the people:

* Are South Americans going Red? No.

* What bothers them then? US neglect, the US recession, US trade barriers.

* What else? US ties with dictators.

* Result? Angry neighbors.

Thus, two distinct lines appear in *U.S. News & World*

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*Report:* (1) Accurate reprints of interviews and public statements, plus first-hand reports by the magazine's own correspondents, many of them unbiased reporting; (2) A selection process of the reprints and interviews which heavily weights them in quantity, number and presentation on the side of Lawrence's personal convictions, and an embellishment of the first-hand reports which carry out the editor's themes in headlines, introductions and other presentations even when these embellishments are contrary to the reports themselves.

Many years ago, Delbert Clark said: "In some ways Lawrence is the most skillful of all the Washington columnists: he has the ability to appear sweetly reasonable while making the most highly prejudiced statements of opinion. . . ." Clark was talking of Lawrence's personal column, but a study of *U.S. News & World Report* leads one to much the same conclusion. It also causes doubt as to the validity of the claim:

IN THE JUNE 13, 1952, issue the editors of the fastest-growing American newsmagazine inserted a special display that took two-thirds of a page. A tinted in-spirational photograph of the United States Supreme Court building plainly showed the legend: EQUAL JUS-TICE UNDER LAW.

The display celebrated the Court's declaration that President Truman's seizure of the steel industry during a labor dispute was unconstitutional. In undisguised admiration of the Court, the display said that no dictatorship is possible in the United States because the Court is a "Barrier to Dictatorship," and in order for tyrants to reign: "... the Supreme Court must be challenged ... or its dictum defied."

In small print at the bottom it said: "Copyright, 1952, U.S. News Pub. Corp."

A study of the magazine in 1958 makes the 1952 display hard to believe. In issue after issue the Supreme Court and its Justices are attacked, articles are published implying that it is dominated by "left-wing" law clerks, the editor refers to its pronouncements as "illegal" and the results as "law" (his quotation marks), and features headlines such as "COURT IS GIVING 'COMFORT' To COMMUNISTS," and says Chief Justice Earl Warren shows "indifference to human suffering."

What happened to change the Court—in the eyes of *U.S. News & World Report*—from a dictator's "barrier" in 1952 to a Communist "comfort" in 1958? And to change the editor, who in 1936 wrote a book, *Nine Honest Men*, in fervent praise of the United States Supreme Court?

A study of the magazine leads one to the conclusion that it was the single act of the 1954 decision declaring racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The

impression is that this decision caused a profound trauma and that the magazine picks at the wound every week. Not one week passed in the first six months of 1958 without a reference to racial integration. The references were sometimes straight news, sometimes highly pertinent opinions accurately recorded, but often a reaching out by the editors for material—accurately reproduced—which in its net impact carried out the feeling against the Supreme Court decision.

The usual reference in headlines and stories was not to "integration," but the most emotional term, "racial mixing." "... President Eisenhower sent troops to force the mixing of the races" (Dec. 27, 1957); "... racial mixing in schools in 1958" (Jan. 3, 1958); "to force racial mixing" (Jan. 10, 1958) and so on during the year.

The high incidence of integration news is by no means poor news judgment. Many would agree that Negro-white relations are the major domestic problem in the United States in our time. Exposure of news, opinion and study fills a real need. Advocacy of one side or the other is in the tradition of free discussion. But the quiet loading of "news" presentation is not.

It is "quiet" in *U.S. News & World Report* because it is largely by use of the words of others and because it is by means of the weight of space and emphasis, rather than outright opposition, as is done quite appropriately in the editor's page. Recently on his editorial page, David Lawrence expressed his personal view of reality in the South when he wrote:

> ... something the South understands and wishes the North could understand too—that racial bitterness between whites and Negroes has never been characteristic of the South.—DAVID LAWRENCE, *Editor*.

As in political and economic items, there are large quantities of anti-Lawrence views published. In the past—though not in the first six months of 1958—there have been long interviews with integrationist leaders, long textual excerpts from Negro sources. In addition, the argument can be made that the most dramatic news has been made by the segregationists and the most vocal arguments made by the South. Despite these factors, there is evidence that *U.S. News & World Report* reaches out for segregationist views. And in absolute measure, the magazine tells the reader more of the segregationist view than of the integrationist.

In the first six months of 1958, the equivalent of 80 pages of race relations or critical Court material appeared in the magazine, at least one item every week. More than 75 percent of these items treated integration critically, either showing it to be a failure or as causing trouble. Thirteen percent was neutral in tone or impact. Six percent was approving (one example: in an interview with the commandant of the US Marines the magazine asked if racial integration is a problem; the maga-

FEBRUARY 2, 1959

15

zine published in straightforward manner the reply that it had worked well).

Race relations show up obsessively in the most unlikely places. On January 3, 1958, the magazine reported that in Uganda schools are to start "racial mixing." Two weeks later, "Racial Problems a New Headache for Red Chinese." The week after, an item on violence in Kansas City schools with the quick reference: "The trouble has centered at Central Junior High School, which is 60 percent Negro. . . ." On February 7 a three-page article on New York school crimes gravitates rapidly to "schools that are heavily populated by Negro and Puerto Rican pupils. . . ."; the week after that, a two-page article on Washington, D. C., where it reported major crimes by Negroes and the opinion that the Supreme Court has crippled law enforcement; the next week another New York City school story—"Is race tension behind the surge of crime in New York City's integrated schools?"

On April 4 "Worldgram, From the Capitals of the World."

Moscow . . . Beirut . . . Paris . . . Bonn . . . Singapore
. . . Here's the Red strategy for US. . . . Talk peace, whip up the "peace at any price" drive. Stir up Negroes to fight segregation.

In the same issue, another article on Washington, D. C., where "Officials estimate that one-fourth of Washington's Negro children are illegitimate." A couple of weeks later a sympathetic account of the election of Prime Minister Strijdom, "Mr. Afrikaner . . . Lion of the Transvaal," in South Africa where there is "strictly enforced racial segregation," and a few weeks later another item on the Union of South Africa, "Where Racial Barriers Keep Going Higher . . . South Africa is now turning to more and more segregation as the answer to its racial problems," quoting only pro-Strijdom sources.

While a reasonable reader would not dispute any one item on integration, the tone and direction of the pattern of coverage is almost obsessively anti-integrationist. Friends of David Lawrence say this is out of character with him, though he is a long-time resident of Washington and Virginia. He has printed material against "group prejudices." Yet the magazine's treatment of the issue, while never excluding integrationist views completely, is overwhelmingly against the Supreme Court decision.

Two-thirds of the October 4, 1957, issue was devoted to the Little Rock crisis, with almost every department of the magazine suffused with emotion. The confidential sounding page, "Washington Whispers," is filled with such items as:

Earl Warren . . . who sold the Supreme Court on ordering . . . Mr. Eisenhower . . . has acted upon his own without consulting his Cabinet. . . . Newspapermen in Little Rock noted that the town was swarming with FBI agents who were reported to be the advance

guards of agents who will move into the South to police the new civil rights law.

The step-by-step formal chronology of events leading to the crisis, ostensibly as unbiased as a calendar, has 66 percent of its three pages devoted to direct and indirect quotations of Gov. Orval Faubus.

A five-page layout, "Political Leaders and Editors Size Up Little Rock Crisis," is 80 percent against integration moves, with 30 percent of the total devoted to Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia. The opinion of a Southern Governor, supporting President Eisenhower, is not quoted. Two full pages quote a bitter segregationist and are entitled: "How James F. Byrnes Sizes Up Integration Troubles." There is no contrary view presented.

An example of the far-reaching enterprise of the magazine to find texts to support its view is the full page in the same issue quoting an editorial from an English Roman Catholic newspaper questioning whether the Roman Catholic Church should regard segregation in schools as "morally wrong and sinful." It is entitled, "A Catholic View on Segregation" (although the overwhelming official Catholic view has been against segregation).

Of all editorial and news material in that issue, 77 percent was essentially anti-integrationist in tone, substance or presentation; 19 percent was neutral; and 4 percent was pro-integration. The 4 percent was the text of the President's television address to the nation.

While segregationists did make news that week, so did those supporting the Supreme Court and integration. The magazine did not publish the text of the federal judge's injunction against violence in Little Rock; nor the President's proclamation before he ordered in troops; nor the speech of the federal Army commander to the high school students; nor the words of J. Edgar Hoover, who said Governor Faubus was lying; nor the text of a statement by the Rev. Billy Graham, a Southerner, condemning the violence and favoring integration, even though *U.S. News & World Report* had devoted a cover story to Billy Graham the week before.

Thus, if one characterized the treatment by *U.S. News & World Report* of integration—and of other issues with which the editor strongly disagrees—one could say that it records dutifully the official news and some of the opposition. And it pursues with enthusiasm, imagination and overwhelming space the ideas dearest to his heart.

"DON'T never prophesy—onless ye know." This is a grandfather's advice by James Russell Lowell and a commandment in ordinary news reporting. *U.S. News & World Report*, more than any of the Big Three news weeklies, is devoted to heavy portions of full texts, verbatim interviews and serious news. But here and there in the pantries of its growing mansion it sips at the wine of prophecy.

This is, perhaps, a natural weakness for a magazine

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that started as a financial report. The financial newsletters that proliferate from Washington and New York indicate that businessmen have a special appetite for forecasts printed in imitation typewriter type, giving the impression that the editor has just received a tip so hot he sat right down, typed it out and ran it to the mailbox. Thus, a number of pages in *U.S. News & World Report* are tinted paper filled with imitation typewriter type and filled with a potpourri of news flashes, general background conditions and forecasts. They are called such names as "Tomorrow, Newsgram," and "Washington Whispers," and "Trend of Business." *U.S. News & World Report* is said to have been the first to introduce the colored-page, imitation-typewriting to regular magazines.

Has it been a noteworthy contribution to public information?

THE magazine's general business forecasts have a good reputation among businessmen, and in 1957 it had the satisfaction of having predicted quite accurately the current recession. (Although, like many a prophet, it began to get nervous when the time came and began to hedge: Jan. 3, 1958—"There was a growing opinion that the drop would prove as brief as it was sharp, with the trend starting to level off early in the new year.")

But when it moves out of the business arena into the political and diplomatic world, the magazine's crystal ball begins to cloud. Early in 1957 it devoted its cover article to "What's Coming in Ike's Second Term." Among other things, it assured the reader,

> ... American influence and power will be felt throughout the non-Communist world. ... Communism in this period is more likely to decline rather than grow in its appeal and influence. ... It is entirely possible that, at the end of a second Eisenhower Administration, the United States will be without rival in all the world in point of military and political and industrial power. ... In this period, too, American power and influence is to push into the Middle East. ... Money from US taxpayers and a warning that the United States will fight ... are counted on to bring stability to countries of that area and to stop the Soviet Union from overt moves. ... A broad measure of prosperity is probable during the second term. ... Unemployment is not expected to become a major problem at any point in the four years ahead. Jobs will be quite plentiful. ...

The second term is not yet over, so it seems safest to suspend judgment on the above forecast and merely wish the prophet luck. But one may be forgiven for questioning the magazine's vision when on May 23, 1958, it said: "Worldgram, From the Capitals of the World. ... Violence in little Lebanon is expected to die down in the face of US power" and the next week added: "In Beirut, odds are against any call for US to send in troops to help Lebanon's pro-Western Government." One week

after that the prophet looked up and said crisply: "Don't expect peace to break out in Lebanon right away."

Not many weeks before, the magazine had said flatly: "Washington Whispers. ... Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia is going to retire next May as president of the nation and as Communist Party secretary." On Dec. 27, 1957, "Washington Whispers" said: "Christian Herter, Under-Secretary of State, is reported by his friends to be unhappy over the fact that he does not play a larger role in policy making. ..." One week later, Washington whispered back: "Christian Herter, Under-Secretary of State, has no intention of giving up the State Department post he holds, despite reports to the contrary indicating dissatisfaction with his job."

For the benefit of any misinformed readers, *U.S. News & World Report* said May 30, 1958: "It turns out that the Central Intelligence Agency knew about the Communist plans in South America to embarrass Vice President Nixon. ..." The misinformed reader could conceivably have got the idea from *U.S. News & World Report* the week before when it said: "Washington Whispers. ... This country's Central Intelligence Agency, counted upon to know in advance what is to happen in foreign countries, missed completely the Communist plans for attacking Nixon in South America."

The reversals in world events and the prophetic whis-
pers tell something. They indicate that unlike most
prophets, those of *U.S. News & World Report* set the
record right when the world insists on going its own
way.

Other harmless editorial peculiarities, plain throwbacks to the *U.S. Daily* 30 years ago when Lawrence recorded government pronouncements, are features like "Newslines—What You as a Businessman Can and Cannot Do, as a result of recent court and administrative decisions." On May 23, 1958, for example, readers learned: "You cannot, as a producer of sugar, avoid paying the manufacturers' excise tax on sugar sold for use on a ship." In a section called "Trend of American Business," the magazine reported that a Texas physician said it is all right to feed infants cold milk, a wife can be taxed on her alimony, and "There are 55 kinds of cockroaches in the US." These are minor inventions on an otherwise formidable structure of the magazine, like the prophecies.

The forecasts indicate another lesson, perhaps not quite learned as yet. On March 21 of last year, the lead prediction in "Tomorrow" read: "A tax cut now appears to be as certain as anything can be in this world."

On June 27, "Tomorrow," shifting to the past tense, reported: "A cut in taxes was not required to reverse a downtrend."

They teach that perhaps death and taxes, but, alas,
little else, including a tax cut, is certain in this world.

(Mr. Bagdikian's analysis of Newsweek and Time will be published next.)

FEBRUARY 2, 1959

17

BOOKS & COMMENT

On Ideas of Culture

by Irving Howe

DURING the past six or seven years there has appeared in England a group of young radical scholars, men who seem to be among the first products of the recent expansion of the English universities to include sons of the working class. Intellectually skilled and intense, they are quite different from those of their over-publicized contemporaries who complain about the

*Culture and Society*, 1780-1950, by Raymond Williams (Columbia; $5).

drabness of the welfare state and the absence of "causes" for which, perhaps, to die. The writers I have in mind are not Marxists, though neither are they anti-Marxist in the heated style of American ex-radicals. Like most intelligent radicals of the fifties, they are cool to ideologies. But they think of themselves as socialists and retain a strong feeling for the plebeian culture of their youth.

Last year these writers brought their ideas together in a lively book called *Conviction*, where they try, with incomplete success, to relate their radicalism to the problems of cultural criticism. Individually, too, they have begun to publish important books: Richard Hoggart's *The Uses of Literacy*, a study of "mass culture" in relation to the working class milieu, and now Raymond Williams' *Culture and Society*, a thoughtful investigation of "the idea of culture" as it has figured in English writing since the time of Burke and Cobbett.

The modern idea of culture, writes Mr. Williams, stems from the early 19th Century: that moment in history where industrialism and romanticism made their first major impact upon English life. The social relations that were then beginning to cohere seemed to many thinkers so morally crippling and so inimical to the Christian sense of charity that there followed a series of powerful and decisive critiques. Cobbett's *Rural Rides*, Shelley's *Defense of Poetry*,

Dickens' *Hard Times*, Mills' essays and autobiography—all of these helped establish a tradition of cultural criticism that continued through the century and was to find a later expression in the work of Eliot, Leavis and Orwell.

The history of this tradition is the history of a growing impulse to look upon culture as something *apart*, culture as a reaction from, then a defense against and finally a basis for criticizing the moral quality of English society. When John Stuart Mill found in Wordsworth's poetry a source of spiritual renewal in a world gone drab, he was acting out the central gesture of that group of English critics who would soon assault society in the name of culture.

Mr. Williams presents this material with learning, clarity and significant detail. He is particularly keen at showing that what troubled the more serious critics of English industrialism was an awareness that somehow a deep fissure had occurred in the life of Western man, a split between the public function to which one is assigned by impersonal forces and that private self which, all too often, has to be regarded as a mere potentiality.

Though by now quite familiar, this idea is a distinctly modern one, perhaps the most radical discovery of the age of romanticism. Edmund Burke would have found it difficult to grasp a criticism of society which took as its premise the values of a sharply differentiated "culture" that, by fate or definition, is confined to an elite minority. For him, what we now call culture still signified a quality or an aspect of a shared, common life; and when he attacked the trend toward industrialism and liberalism, he did so in the name of a traditional organic society which had been present—or so he could persuade himself—in the recent English past. He did not feel himself to be part of a saving or a salvaged remnant.

William Cobbett, equally in recoil

from industrialism, though speaking from a moral standpoint that made him sympathize with its plebeian victims, based his criticism of English society not so much on a real or imagined organic past as on his own experience. He could remember the rural England of his boyhood, and by comparison with the damage being done to the countryside by the Industrial Revolution, that England seemed to him good and wholesome.

It is this idea of another England, whether as a genuine memory, a romantic assumption or a dramatic fiction, which binds together the work of the radical and conservative critics, just as it binds together the work of Cobbett and Burke. Both groups of critics are concerned with the loss of community, the human cost of impersonal existence. When Disraeli writes,

> There is no community in England;
> there is aggregation, but aggregation
> under circumstances which make it
> rather a dissociating than a uniting
> principle . . .

he is anticipating the moral accents of English socialism. When Ruskin writes of the division of labor under industrialism,

> It is not, truly speaking, the labor that
> is divided; but the men:—Divided into
> mere segments of men—broken into
> crumbs of life . . .

he is anticipating the critique of conservative organicism.

BUT what Ruskin writes could be, and indeed was, said by Marx, just as what Disraeli writes could be, and was, echoed by Belloc. The interchangeability of much radical and conservative criticism of 19th Century industrialism—this is one of the most striking impres-

Every $1 sends a 22 lb. Food Crusade package to the world's hungry thru CARE, New York 16

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THE NEW REPUBLIC

sions left by Mr. Williams' book. Only when conservative and radical writers came to suggest ideal images of society did they significantly diverge, one group looking toward a culture resting on a hierarchy of orderly relationships and the other toward a culture resting on a democratic fraternity of peers.

Still another impression follows from reading Mr. Williams: that for all their sharpness and eloquence, the English writers failed to develop a theory about the human consequences of industrialism that could compare to the German theory of "alienation," as it has come down to us from Hegel, Marx and the later sociologists. The passages Mr. Williams quotes from his writers are invariably to the point and often brilliant; but if you check them against their context, they seem little more than flashes of insight, they do not form part of a sequence of systematic thought. (This is particularly true for William Morris, who in Mr. Williams' sympathetic selection looms larger than he can on his own.) But perhaps because they failed to build up a unified theory, these English writers did something else that is extremely valuable: they provided, through the touchstone of cultural values, one of the most humane styles we have yet discovered for the criticism of society.

It is in the prose writings of the romantic poets that this idea of culture is for the first time fully articulated. Wordsworth distinguished between the debased Public and "the People, philosophically considered." Philosophically considered, however, the People is something very different from the people actually observed; and soon Wordsworth takes another step when he speaks of "the embodied spirit of [the People's] knowledge." This last phrase, in turn, allows him to set up, in Mr. Williams' words, "the Idea, a standard of excellence . . . as something superior to the course of events." The "something superior" is the notion of high culture, a bulwark of traditions and values which a cultivated minority is to employ for the sake of survival.

Shelley wrote in a similar vein: "Poetry and the Principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and Mammon of this world." Coleridge proposed the establishment of a "clerisy," a special class that would take responsibility for "the general cultivation." And as Mr. Williams shrewdly

"At a time when the artist is being described as just one more producer of a commodity for the market, he is describing himself as a specially endowed person, the guiding light of the common life." Soon, to keep that light

from being snuffed out or blackened by plebeian soot, it will be turned away entirely from common life.

On this development Mr. Williams has some cogent things to say:

The positive consequence of the idea

## The Dread and the Fear of the Mind of the Others

### (Passage from *The Studies of Narcissus*)

THE RIVER'S FRESHNESS sailed from unknown sources—
The others were the despots of despair,
They snickered, giggled, laughed aloud at last:
They mocked and marvelled at the statue which I seemed;
I seemed to them a silly caricature, strained,
Stiff and estranged, a statue of self-love!
Since self-infatuation seemed my self to them
—Truly my true love!—although I was
A stillness of nervousness, nervous as caricature,
I cannot more than merely guess why they supposed
Self-love was unrequited or betrayed:
They thought I had fallen in love with my own face,
And this belief became the night-like obstacle
To understanding my long, unbroken suffering,
My studious self-regard, enduring the pain of hope,
Torn by the torment of all possibility:
How then could I have expected them to see in me
That being as I was seemed to me merely
To be as repugnant as a toad, a frog:
The face at which I stared continually
In the river rippled and ravelled, often was to me
As detestable and amorphous as an octopus,
Or like a gas-mask, swollen and anonymous:
The others never said or thought: he stares at night,
As in the day, but sees no face or light throughout the night!
Knowing their certainty that I was only
A monument, a monster who had fallen in love
With himself alone, how could I have—could I have?—
Told them what was in me, within my heart, trembling and passionate
Within the labyrinth and caves of my mind, which is
Like every mind, partly or wholly hidden from itself?
The words for what is in my heart and in my mind
Do not exist. But I must seek and search to find
Amid the vines and orchards of the vivid world of day
For what is within my heart and dark within my mind:
Approximate images, imaginary parallels
Comparisons and mere metaphors: for all—each one
Of them are substitutes, both counterfeit and vague:
They are, at most, deceptive resemblances,
False in their very likeness, like the sons
Who are alike and kin and more unlike and false
Because they seem the father's very self: but each one is
—Although begotten by the same sire—himself,
The unique self, each is unique, like every other self,
And every living thing, older or younger, nevertheless
A passionate nonesuch who never before has been. Never again will be.
Do you hear, do you see? Do you understand me now? and how
The words for what is my heart do not exist?

DELMORE SCHWARTZ