An Abridged History of the United States

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AN ABRIDGED HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES


BY WILLIAM M. BRINTON

Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com


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Why Use the Internet for an American History Textbook? In June, 1996 the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania held that the Communications Decency Act was unconstitutional as violating the constitutional guarantee of free speech. Plaintiffs in this case included the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the American Library Association and a host of other interested and scholarly groups and individual citizens who post materials on the Internet. Janet Reno, in her capacity as Attorney General of the United States, was defendant in this landmark case. The 67 page text may be seen at 929 F. Supp. 824 or downloaded and printed from the ACLU on the Internet. The United States has filed a Notice of Appeal, and in due course this case will be argued before the Supreme Court of the United States. As a lawyer myself -- retired after some forty-five years -- I hope that this case may be accessed via Oyez Oyez, the words traditionally used by the Clerk of the Court to open session. Oyez Oyez has already performed a valuable function for historians. By this date in 1996 -- September 6 -- it had digitized over fifty cases so that Internet users may hear the voices of counsel arguing their case before the highest court of the land. So far the cases accessible include subjects as diverse as the Commerce Clause, Separation of Powers, Federalism, Religious Freedom/Religious Establishment, Freedom of Expression, Freedom of the Press, Privacy, Racial Equality and Due Process of Law. By way of example, one may listen to the oral arguments of counsel in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States decided on December 14, 1964. A three-judge constitutional test of the public accommodations provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A three-judge District Court had permanently enjoined the motel from discrimination on account of race. This case was one of a long line of cases striking down as unconstitutional those laws enacted principally in the South after Plessy v. Ferguson decided in 1896. It gave the white majority a license to erect barriers blocking African-Americans from joining mainstream America on an equal basis. They still have a long way to go as heard in the oral arguments in Adarand v. Pena decided on June 12, 1995. I have cited numerous decisions of the Supreme Court in An Abridged History of the United States. In ways not familiar to the vast majority of Americans, their lives have been shaped or changed by decisions of the Supreme Court. Views of the Court often change as the individual justices Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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bring their own agenda with them to the highest court of the land. Seven justices were nominated by Republican presidents and confirmed by the Senate; Chief Justice Rehnquist, and Associate Justices Scalia, O'Conner, Thomas, Kennedy, Stevens and Souter. President Clinton has named two justices; Charles Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. In ACLU v. Reno, et al, at the District Court made Findings of Fact. In part one of them states: "In all, reasonable estimates are that as many as 40 million people around the world can and do access the enormously flexible communications Internet medium. That figure is expected to grow to 200 million Internet users by the year 1999." Approximately 65 percent of them -- 130 million -- will live in the United States. This is a huge market, and I have made it possible for these users to download An Abridged History of the United States at no charge. I hope Internet users will want to share my knowledge of history. I do not offer this textbook as a scholarly treatise. I graduated from Yale University in 1942 majoring in International Relations and History, served as a Navy aviator from 1941-1945 -- my carrier was sunk in October, 1944 during the Battle of the Philippine Sea - and returned to go through law school at the University of Virginia. From 1948 to 1990 I practiced law in San Francisco, principally litigation in the federal courts. In 1985, I started Mercury House from Scratch. It published general interest books on the environment, some aspects of history and current events as well as fiction. Mercury House has published books in translation from French, German, Spanish, Russian, Korean and Greek. As of late 1996 Mercury House had some 150 books in print. I retired as its publisher in 1995 and took a year to write this textbook.

William M. Brinton San Francisco 06 September 1996


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In November, 1995 the Department of Education issued its report on the knowledge of American history on the part of 22,000 students in fifty states. Lewis Lapham, Editor of Harper's Magazine, was utterly dismayed. He wrote that "More than 50 percent of all high school seniors were unaware of the Cold War. Nearly six of ten were bereft of even a primitive understanding of where America came from ... For twenty years, the ministers of American education (university deans as well as federal bureaucrats) have been reporting signs of decay -- low SAT scores, declining verbal aptitude and a general inability to find Tokyo on a map.... The news is familiar but it takes on a fresh urgency in the context of the present mood of suspicion and resentment: Washington perceived as the temple of doom, the nation betrayed by demogogues of all descriptions. Our ignorance adds to our stores of anger. The practice of our democracy depends on a sense of, and knowledge of, history in the same way that playing in the World Series requires a bat and a ball." I asked a high school teacher of American history why so many students got turned off. Was it by boring textbooks, too much television, or some mediocre teachers? "It's not really any of the above," he replied. "They simply don't feel connected to history. They don't relate to it." Most of today's parents have long commutes, more often than not at least two hours one way; today's cities have run out of affordable housing, but that's where both parents have jobs. The bottom-line result is less quality time with growing children. So they feel left out and parents don't sense this lack of "connectedness." Parents who may not have travelled outside the United States, who have not seen Westminister Cathedral in London, for example, the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Berlin Wall, now levelled with the end of the Cold War, the pyramids in Egypt, the Vatican in Rome, or even Constitution Hall in Philadelphia cannot share their own experience with their own children. Most of the history of Western Civilization is thus very abstract and non-personal. The Constitution itself was drafted by scholars familiar with their history and Western civilization. Today, the way government operates, how members of our Congress are elected, and how the judicial system functions are all determined by the Constitution. It was ratified in 1789 and amended in 1791 by adding the first ten amendments as a Bill of Rights. The First Amendment, for example, guaranteed freedom of speech and the press. It was not until 1920, however, that women got the right to vote. Then, in 1971, the


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Twenty-Sixth Amendment provided that the voting age for all elections was set at 18 years. It was ratified by the states in record time. Until 1882, the individual states regulated immigration. In that year, Congress enacted the Immigration Act of 1882 which imposed a federal head tax of fifty cents per immigrant. This tax was challenged by those who paid it, but the Supreme Court upheld Congressional power to regulate immigration. The Head Money Cases, 112 U.S. 580 (1885). Within seven years (1892), Ellis Island opened as the point of entry for immigrants into the United States. Until it closed in 1954, approximately 12 million immigrants passed through Ellis Island. An estimated forty percent of today's population of 260 million people can trace their ancestry to those who entered the United States via Ellis Island. Over 122 distinct ethnic groups brought their culture to the shores of America, making the United States the most multicultural nation in the world. The countries with the most migrants going through Ellis Island included Italy, Russia, Hungary, Austria, Germany, England, Ireland, Sweden, Greece, Norway, Turkey, and Scotland. More recently, China, other Asian nations, and Vietnam were added to the countries of origin. The Internet offers an American Studies Site that includes African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Native American Studies, Latino and Chicano Studies, and Other Race and Ethnic Studies. The Internet also offers a Biodiversity Policy Briefing on Global Resources and international efforts to prevent further environmental degradation. The material was organized and made available to Internet users by the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Three important policy vehicles for protecting biodiversity are the Endangered Species Act, the National Biological Service of the Department of the Interior, and the Convention on Biological Diversity. In 1993, this convention was signed by President Clinton, but a Republican Senate has ended attempts to ratify this critical treaty. The Rainforest Action Network (RAN) offers an Internet campaign to stop the World Bank from financing environmentally destructive projects. Most of these projects are in the Third World. RAN also describes its efforts to boycott products sold by the Mitsubishi Corporation, one of the largest corporate destroyers of the world's forests in the Phillipines, Malaysia, Papua, New Guinea, Bolivia, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, Canada, and Siberia. The products sold by the Mitsubishi Corporation or by one of its 190 interlinked companies worldwide include automobiles, trucks, bicycles, television sets, VCRs, fax machines, microchips, Nikon cameras, Kirin beer, Value Rent-A-Car, and the Bank of California. Protection of the environment is now seen as a way of stabilizing the political economies of Third World nations. A failure to consider their stability


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leads to the alternative, chaos and the collapse of order. Liberia is an example, with anarchy in Monrovia, its capital. Farmers in Liberia used destructive agricultural practices, probably from the beginning of time. The nutrients in the soil have been depleted by overtilled, overfertilized, and overirrigated earth. Excessive irrigation depletes the water level. Additionally, the farmers used dangerous pesticides-ones already labeled as unsafe in the United States. As a result, farmers had to encroach further into the rainforest to find more arable land after a few years at one location. Soon, the rainforest, as a complete ecosystem, all but disappeared, and farmers had to abandon the soil. They moved to the cities, where there were no jobs, housing or food for all these new arrivals from the abandoned farms. The cities could not support the influx of these rural migrants. Crime raged, tribal warfare erupted, and disease spun out of control. Without waste treatment and disposal systems, the rivers of Liberia were polluted beyond belief. This is the story of most West African countries, such as Sierra Leone, Gabon, Togo, Guinea, Ghana, Nigeria, Cìte d'Ivoire, and Burkina Faso. Some of these countries are either decayed or on the brink of decaying. With population pressures and without internal resources -- Nigeria does have oil -- governments weaken only to be replaced by private armies and urban chaos. It is time to understand just what the environment is and the importance of its preservation. Robert D. Kaplan wrote "The Coming Anarchy" which was published by The Atlantic Monthly in its February, 1994 issue. Random House published his recent book, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century. Kaplan who had expanded his earlier article into a 441-page book, describes the environment as the "national security issue of the early twenty-first century." The political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation, soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and possibly, rising sea levels on critical, overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh -- are developments that will prompt mass migrations and in turn, incite group conflicts...." Resolution of the problems created by this chaos will be the foreign policy challenge of the next decades, and only those versed in history need apply.

William M. Brinton San Francisco August 1996


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In the Twentieth century, there were three great transforming events. The Great Depression from 1929 to the outbreak of World War II, World War II itself and the Vietnam War from 1960 to 1975. Before World War II began, Americans lived in a world threatened by Germany's Nazis, Italy's Fascists, and the Soviet Union's Communists. Japanese militarists had invaded China in 1934 and threatened the entire Far East from Korea to Singapore, and Indonesia. Japan had no oil to operate its industrial machinery and had no raw materials to produce weapons. It had to buy steel abroad to build its army, navy and aircraft. Its Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere visualized territorial expansion and military power. In Europe, Germany occupied Austria in 1938 and claimed the Sudetenland of Czechslovakia. Italy had colonies in Africa and wanted more. So Benito Mussolini bombed helpless Ethiopia into submission in 1937. The Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939 was the forerunner of a far greater war involving the struggle against dictatorship, with both Germany, Italy, and Russia providing weapons to the combatants. On July 18, 1936 Francisco Franco proclaimed a military rebellion and became head of state a few months later as El Caudillo, the leader, of Spain's Fascist Party. However, Franco did not defeat the leftist Popular Front troops until just before the outbreak of war in Europe, April 1, 1939. Spain remained relatively neutral during World War II. The immediate cause of World War II was a total failure of will on the part of Great Britain and France. Nothing was done when Hitler announced in 1938 that Austria has a new province of Germany. Neville Chamberlain, Britain's Prime Minister returned from Munich with a useless piece of paper, Hitler's promise that he wanted no more Lebensraum, or living space for Germans. This promise was broken on September 1, 1939. World War II began on September 3, 1939. Two days earlier, Adolf Hitler's Nazi forces had marched into Poland. In this Blitzkrieg, the Nazi forces quickly acquired control of the air with Stuka dive bombers and other aircraft now seen only in museums. German Panzer divisions, supported by tanks seemed invincible. They were, and Polish forces were soon defeated. Great Britain and France both had treaties with Poland that required they intervene with their own forces in defense of Poland. On September 3, 1939 both Great Britain and France declared war on Germany.


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Europe in 1914

Europe in 1939

British troops began arriving in France to defend that country so illprepared for war. Its leaders were living with a Maginot Line mentality. The Maginot Line was a series of underground fortresses built on the border between France and Germany. Unfortunately, its military architects did not anticipate that German forces would invade France by marching through Belgium and the Netherlands. This was the same invasion route used by the German troops of Kaiser Wilhelm in World War I (1914 to 1918). By September 28, 1939 Hitler and Joseph Stalin divided up conquered Poland and the treaty signed by both just before war broke out allowed the Soviet Union to occupy Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. Nazi forces were busy in early 1940. They defeated Noway and occupied Yugoslavia and Greece. By June, 1940 Hitler's Nazi forces had occupied Paris. The Japanese launched a sneak attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941, and most of the world was at war. After gearing up for wartime production after the attack on Pearl Harbour, the first landing of American troops in the near-European theater of war occurred in November, 1942. They landed in French Morrocco and fought across North Africa. Allied troops invaded Italy in late 1943 and drove German and Italian forces northward in some of World War II's bloodiest battles. Dwight D. Eisenhower, elected President of the United States in 1952, was Supreme Commander of all allied forces in Europe. He knew that infantry and tanks would win the war, but Eisenhower also knew that control of the air was essential. American bombers were produced almost on an assembly line basis, first the B-17 or Flying Fortress, the B-24 Liberator, and later the B-29. British and American aircraft flew almost daily missions to knock out German railway hubs and that country's heavy industry. After World War II, Germany lay in ashes, its major cities bombed, and Italy was prostrate economically. The Soviet Union became an enemy of the West with its plan to expand the reach of Communism, and the Cold War began in 1947. It changed the way we lived and waged war. For Russia, World War II began on June 22, 1941 when Hitler's armored forces invaded the Soviet Union using a defeated Poland as a



military springboard. Hitler's generals didn't like invading Russia over a hundred years later; they remembered Napoleon's defeat by Russia. Napoleon I invaded Czarist Russia in 1810 and was driven back by Russian troops. Hitler, however, was Der Führer, so they followed orders. Eventually, the Soviet Red Army drove these German forces back as far as Berlin in 1945. Germany surrendered to the Allies in May, 1945. Adolf Hitler took his own life in his Berlin bunker command post. For the United States, World War II began on December 7, 1941, when Japanese carrier-launched aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor, sinking some Navy vessels, including battleships and destroying most of the American aircraft on the ground. Within four days days, President Franklin Roosevelt had requested Congress to declare war against Japan, Germany, and Italy. Benito Mussolini, Il Duce, had joined forces with Hitler only after most of France was occupied by Hitler's Nazis in 1940. Four years later, on June 6, 1944 Allied forces landed in Normandy and began the series of battles that led to Berlin and Germany's surrender. In that German capital, American, British, French, and Canadian troops met troops of the Soviet Union's Red Army at the River Elbe.

Meeting of East & West American soldier & Russian soldier shake hands at the bank of the River Elbe, 1945

The war in the Pacific used air power and forces from the Army and the Marines to occupy the island chain from Midway to Okinawa, beginning with the invasion of New Guinea and Guadalcanal in 1942. The carrier battle of Midway in June, 1942 was probably the turning point of the war in the Pacific. The Japanese Navy lost four carriers and was never again a real force at sea. The United States Navy used Eniwetok as a huge harbor for its supply line to ships, allowing them to refuel at sea and launch their aircraft to provide air cover for troops. These troops invaded the Mariannas, Guam, Tinian and Saipan, Iwo Jima, and finally the Philippines in 1944 and early 1945. With Guam, the Army had a base from which its B-29s could bomb Japan itself.


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Japanese Carrier Mogami This dramatic photo was taken throught the scope of the US Sub "Nautilus".

In August, 1945 American aircraft dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan and three days later dropped the second on Nagasaki. In both cities combined, an estimated 200,000 Japanese civilians died. President Truman has been criticized for his decision to use these bombs. However, he authorized them based on the evidence he had at the time. His military staff told him that thousands of American soldiers would be killed in any invasion of Japan itself. Truman would have been severely criticized, even impeached had he decided not to use these two atomic bombs to shorten the war and save American lives. Nuclear weapons were widely available to the United States, France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and eventually China. In this country, an entire new industry was created to build nuclear weapons and the missiles to launch them against targets in the Soviet Union. These targets were fixed in advance using new technology, a combination of gyroscopes and computers for guidance of missiles. What developed was the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD). The possession of enough nuclear weapons to destroy the entire planet was more than enough to stop the United States from launching missiles toward the Soviet Union. Its leaders knew that the United States faced devastating retaliation from Soviet missiles if it resorted to a first use of these deadly weapons. In the more than forty years of the Cold War from 1947 to 1989, no nuclear missile was ever launched in anger, either by this country or by the Soviet Union. In 1945, very little was known about the radioactive, toxic fallout from the use of these bombs. It was not until 1950 that the Atomic Energy Commission, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy learned a lot about radioactivity. It began nuclear testing in 1951 at the Nevada Test Site. The only victims, American citizens, lived in areas drenched by radioactive fallout, most of whom died horribly of cancer. The government concealed the danger to humans and lied for thirty years about what happened as a direct result of nuclear testing. See Allen et al v. United States, 588 F. Supp. 247 (Central Division Utah 1984). Plaintiffs were granted compensation for their injuries, but the District Court was reversed by the appellate court, 816 F. 3d 1417 (10th Cir. 1987), cert den 484 U.S. 1004 (1987). Random House published a book of photographs of some victims with text and individual stories assembled by the


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photographer, Carole Gallagher. Its title is American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War. Even before the German surrender, American, British, Canadian and Soviet troops advancing west discovered the horrifying Nazi death camps. Jews had been sent there as prisoners who were either killed by the Nazis or found, starving and emaciated, by Allied troops. Hitler believed in a Germany, free of any but pure Aryan stock. Six million Jews were killed, many by poison gas of German manufacture, and their remains were either burned in the furnaces of Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka or other death camps, some located in Poland. Both Israel and the United States built memorial museums of the Holocaust, so the world would not forget those atrocities. [See the Simon Wiesenthal Center]. The same cruel practices were used in the former Yugoslavia fifty years later and described by Serbian leaders as "ethnic cleansing," also known as genocide.

Belsen Death Camp The weak and the dying carry the dead bodies to the heap of the dead at Belsen

Politically, economically, militarily, and culturally, World War II was a transforming event in the history of the United States. It was the crucible that reshaped the thinking of all those who lived through it and continues to affect those born after it. Only the struggle to end British rule of America in 1776, the Revolutionary War ending British rule of the United States, the drafting and ratification of the Constitution by the original thirteen colonies, the expansion to the west in America, the Civil War that ended slavery in the United States and preserved the union, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the Vietnam War rank with World War II in importance. Out of this war, American experts developed the computer and its scientists developed rockets and the fuel sufficient to put men on the moon in 1969. Our jet aircraft, both passenger and military were second to none anywhere in the world. More people than ever before entered school or college after 1945, most of the older students returning veterans. Their education was financed by the G. I. Bill of Rights enacted by Congress in 1944. In the same year, the Supreme Court held that black Americans could vote in national elections. Smith v. Allright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944). The struggle for civil rights was to begin with the end of World War II


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In 1945, delegates from eighty nations met in San Francisco. Their purpose was to create the United Nations. Even with its present imperfections, it has worked well, particularly when it sends its bluehatted soldiers on missions around the world to separate potentially warring factions in a peaceful manner. American factories devoted only to wartime production -- they turned out some 295,000 aircraft, 71,000 ships, and 86,000 tanks -- converted to peacetime production soon after the end of the war in August, 1945. During the war, American factory production and Allied troops won the war, having helped both Russia and the Western allies rearm. Some sixteen million women worked on assembly lines of plants turning out all these wartime products. About 300,000 women wore uniforms, and a lot of them served in combat zones. Returning veterans displaced women. Those who had been paid well were suddenly unemployed. The end of World War II left some unsolved problems that President Truman and later presidents had to deal with in a race to superpower status by the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War had begun. The Soviet Union's Red Army was both intact and a threat to Western Europe. In 1947, the United States, France, Great Britain, West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Canada joined forces to establish the North American Treaty Organization (NATO). From the very outset, NATO was intended to defend Europe against a threat from the Soviet Union. East Germany -- it was divided by Soviet occupation -- Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Rumania joined forces to create the Warsaw Pact. In August, 1961 Eric Honecker, the president of East Germany, authorized construction of the Berlin Wall, principally to prevent East Germans from fleeing the communist Honecker régime. While some Germans were shot and killed trying to escape East Germany, hordes of East Germans managed to flee through Austria via Hungary and freedom in the West. The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia during 1989, rebellion in Poland that led to free elections there, and resistance to communist repression in Hungary all brought about the collapse of communist governments there and in Rumania. The Soviet Union itself was in disarray, and some of its republics actually seceded to establish governments of their own. Chechnya was one break away republic in 1992. Russian forces bombed unarmed civilians there, trying to recapture Grozny, its capital. President Boris Yeltsin ran for reelection in 1996 and won in the runoff, but the war in Chechnya was unpopular enough with the Russian people to threaten Yeltsin's bid to serve another four years. In November, 1989 liberated Germans celebrated the demolition of the Berlin Wall. Its demolition marked the symbolic ending of the era known


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as the Cold War. It was more than symbolic for the Central European states. East Germany was unified with the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990. Poland held free elections. The Baltic states slowly recovered their freedom from Soviet occupation. Czechoslovakia and Hungary both held free elections. Bulgaria and Rumania followed suit with mixed results. For details of the mostly nonviolent liberation of these occupied nations, see Without Force or Lies: Voices from the Revolution of Central Europe in 1989-90 edited by William M. Brinton and Alan Rinzler.

Europe in 1996

From 1945 to 1989, nine presidents of the United States developed foreign policies on the assumption that the division of Europe the Cold War symbolized would continue indefinitely. During this period of fortyfour years the United States and the Soviet Union were superpowers presiding respectively over the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact nations of central and eastern Europe. George Kennan's policy of containing Communism dominated Washington's reactions to Soviet adventurism for years. There were many examples of this adventurism. In 1956, Soviet forces moved into Hungary to subdue those who questioned Russian authority, and in 1968 Soviet troops occupied Prague to end the "Prague Spring" of Anton Dubcek in Czechslovakia. The United States did nothing about this aggressive conduct, a decade apart, first in Hungary and then in Czechoslovakia. Washington was driven by a fear of Communism during the 1950s. In 1957, for example, Congress indicated its approval of the Eisenhower Doctrine. It authorized the President to provide assistance, including American armed forces "to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political independence of such [Middle East] nations, requesting such aid, against overt aggression from any nation controlled by international communism." Abdul Gamal Nasser, president of Egypt was the principal culprit. Nasser was an Arab nationalist who had allowed the Soviet Union to arm his forces with Russian weapons and aircraft in response to Western hostility. Washington, together with Paris and London saw all this as a threat to the Suez Canal and oil from the Persian Gulf states. Actually, the Suez Canal was closed for a short time in 1956, but by Nasser himself. He nationalized it. Nasser ordered ships in the canal sunk, closing the Suez. President Eisenhower demanded that Britain, France and Israel withdraw Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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from the Sinai Desert from which they were about to launch an attack to protect the Suez Canal against its nationalization by Nasser. "It wasn't timely," he said. Eisenhower will always be remembered for his farewell speech of 1960, in which he warned Americans about the dangers of "the militaryindustrial complex." Congress simply ignored this advice; Congress asked the American taxpayer to pay the bill for arming America against Communism which had a long history of repression and territorial ambitions. NATO was Europe's first line of defense against the Soviet Union. Early in the history of NATO, some 400,000 American troops were stationed in Europe. Communism began in Russia with its apostles Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin. In November, 1917 Lenin formed the world's first communist government, having first ordered the execution of the Russian Tsar and his entire family. Lenin died in 1923 and was succeeded by Joseph Stalin. Stalin was a ruthless tyrant responsible for the deaths of at least nine million "kulaks" and political dissidents who silently opposed Stalin's prison camps in Siberia where most of them were sent to die. The kulaks were farmers who resented agricultural collectives run for the state. In 1939, Stalin struck a Faustian bargain, a nonaggression treaty, with Adolf Hitler. One month later, Germany invaded Poland, starting World War II. Almost two years later, Hitler, having defeated England and France in Europe, ordered the German attack on the Soviet Union. By the terms of its agreement with Germany, the Soviet Army occupied the Baltic states, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia in 1940. England carried on alone until 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbour. Communism existed on the other side of the world. It arose partly out of the corruption of the Manchu Dynasty in China and partly because of the appeal of communism for people like Sun Yat-sen. Sun is widely regarded as the father of modern China. He unified China and established a republic. Sun died in 1925, but his Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang, survived to the point of agreeing with Mao that they should jointly oppose the Japanese invasion of mainland China. In 1934, Mao Tse Tung was driven out of Jiangxi Province by local anticommunist forces. So Mao marched north in what was known as the Long March. In the next year, however, Mao's forces and the Chinese Nationalists forged a united front to oppose the Japanese who had occupied parts of China. This united front ended in 1945, and by 1949 Mao's forces had prevailed in his postwar revolution against corrupt warlords and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists. During and even after World War II, the United States supported Chiang's Nationalists. In 1949 Chiang


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was displaced by Mao. It took Mao six years to design and launch his Great Leap Forward in 1955. It was an economic disaster for China. To deal with rising opposition within the communist government, Mao launched his Cultural Revolution. This program was also a disaster that wrecked the party bureaucracy, paralyzed education and research, and left China's economy in a shambles. Chiang Kai-shek was forced to leave China for refuge in Taiwan with his armed forces. Politicians in the United States were quick to criticize the Democrats for "losing China" and leaving Mao's Communists in full control of the Peoples' Republic of China (PRC). China was not ours to lose; its own internal dynamics absolutely guaranteed what happened. A largely peasant population without land of its own saw Mao as a leader who could justify seizing land from corrupt owners and installing peasants instead. Mao simply surrounded Chinese cities and compelled the urban population to acknowledge his claim as leader or starve. Until 1953, Mao's China and Stalin's Soviet Union enjoyed cordial relations, but a deep ideological split divided them in 1955. Mao came to consider the Soviets as revisionists and thus traitors to the cause of world revolution. The PRC and the United States normalized diplomatic relations in 1979 with the clear understanding that there was only one China. The PRC considered Taiwan as an upstart island province that would, in due time rejoin mainland China. In 1979, Russian forces invaded Afghanistan, and the CIA saw this Soviet intervention as an opportunity. Weapons made in America were funneled to Afghan fighters via Pakistan, a country led by right wing generals. This American support for potential or actual rightists has been a persistent theme in Washington so long as the rightist and corrupt military was staunchly anticommunist. This Leitmotif led the United States to ignore human rights in El Salvador, support the contras in Nicaragua, and a corrupt regime in Vietnam. The United States has not hesitated to deploy its armed forces since 1945. American forces were sent to Korea in 1950, they invaded Grenada in 1985, Panama in 1989, and they assembled the largest contingent of troops in the Gulf War of 1991. From 1954 to 1975, American forces fought the war in Vietnam, and 58,000 of them died there. All five of these wars were in violation of the Constitution and international law. In Grenada, American forces found only a few bewildered Cuban construction workers. They were working on an airport expansion and supervised by a few Soviet technicians. This was enough for President Reagan; the Communists were coming, and they had to be stopped. In Panama, the army captured General Manual Noriega. Curiously, the Bush


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Administration is thought by many Panamanians to have deliberately let Noriega get out of control. The United States would then have enough reason to send its Army to invade Panama to restore order. Then, by effectively demobilizing the Panamanian army, the Bush Administration would have a reason to retain control of the Panama Canal. The treaty by which the United States agreed to relinquish control over the Panama Canal would terminate at noon Panama time on December 31, 1999. At that time, the Republic of Panama would take over the obligation of defending the Canal. However, without an army, it could not assume any such obligation. A referendum on whether the people of Panama want the United States to remain as their military protector is scheduled for 1996. In any event, Noriega was tried in Florida and convicted of drug offenses. However, the costs of this invasion are estimated at over $3 billion; this amount covered reconstruction of civilian housing damaged by bombs dropped from American military aircraft. In March, 1990 President Bush proposed and Congress approved an economic aid package for Panama. The war in Vietnam was instructive. Initially, in 1952, it was seen as a post-World War II French effort to restore its former colony, Indochina, with U.S. military assistance. The French defeat in 1954 had very little effect on American policy during the next seven years, except that alarm bells rang in Washington at this victory by Ho Chi Minh's forces. Vietnam was cut in half by the Geneva Accords of 1954. Washington had already made a policy commitment to send arms to Saigon in South Vietnam. The war began in 1961 as a blundering exercise in do-good deployment; first the weapons were sent with advice about how to use them, and then the soldiers. The French resented the advice, but used the weapons. The local Vietnamese didn't want to fight an American-initiated war on their own soil. South Vietnam and its absolutely corrupt regime should be saved so it could serve as a bulwark against Communism in Asia. Otherwise, this American rationale goes, friendly nations like Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and the Philippines would fall like "dominoes." As time passed, it became clear that the South Vietnamese were just not willing to fight against their ethnic brothers from the North led by a wily revolutionary named Ho Chi Minh. He was a nationalist who thought the United States would agree to support him by ending French colonial rule.


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Company "E" (1968) Members of Company "E", 2nd Bn, 327th Inf, 101st. Abn Div, make their way across a river near Hill 608 in the A Shau Valley during operation "Somerset Plain"

Instead, Washington gave the French both arms and advice until the French surrendered at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Thereafter, the war escalated beginning in 1961. So more and more Americans were sent to Vietnam to fight, and the military infrastructure to support them expanded by quantum leaps. It was not until 1968 and the Tet offensive that the American business community was convinced that the affair was too costly. The United States could not impose a solution except at a price in life and treasure too costly in terms of its domestic priorities. Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, first for John F. Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson, confirmed all this in his book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam published in 1995. In his confirmation hearings as Secretary of Defense, Mr. McNamara -he was nominated by President John F. Kennedy -- offered an apocalyptic view of Communism. "There is no parallel," he said, "to the drive of Soviet Communist imperialism to colonize the world...To this primitive concept of total obliteration [of the free world], the Communists have brought the resources of modern technology and science...." The available evidence suggests that the Soviet Union had no intention of expanding its dominion by using a nuclear umbrella to pursue its imperialist ambitions. Deterrence, the notion that the Soviet Union was deterred from using its nuclear weapons by the possession by the United States of nuclear-tipped missiles, worked quite well. However, all the costs associated with the development and deployment of nuclear weapons from 1942 to 1996 added up to an estimated $4.7 trillion in the gross national debt of the United States. These wars were not without a huge cost to taxpayers, most of it funneled to corporate America via the Pentagon during the Reagan-Bush years from 1980 to 1992. Three years later, the new Republicans in Congress authorized three B-2 Stealth bombers in for a Department of Defense that did not want them at all; they cost taxpayers one billion each, and the old B-2s had not passed their performance tests for six successive years. The military industrial complex was quite busy and enormously profitable, and the Pentagon authorized the most expensive aircraft toilet


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seats anywhere at $800 a copy. The executives of corporate America now enjoy inflated salaries and other forms of extravagant compensation, a fact only intermittently noticed by the national press. In 1980, the national debt was about $1 trillion. In 1992, after two Republican presidents, this debt had risen to about $4 trillion, an average increase of $250 billion in each of twelve years. To the extent that this money was spent, ie., distributed within the United States, it was distributed unevenly. This political largesse represented the largest redistribution of wealth in the country's history. The income and wealth gap between the rich and the poor has widened to unprecedented levels in the last ten or twelve years. California is only one example of this stunning disparity. Its overall poverty rate in 1994 was 18.6 percent of the population. Approximately 2.36 million children in California lived in poverty as of the end of 1994. This was the year that the Republicans gained control of both the House and Senate for the first time in forty years. The new Republicans entertain ideas other than reducing the funds for those living in poverty. Prayer in the nation's public schools was part of their agenda. Amending the First Amendment to introduce religion in America's public schools was unthinkable as recently as 1992. However, the Christian Coalition has different ideas. It pushed hard for a constitutional amendment to do just that by demanding prayer in the public schools. Right now, there is a test case in Utah, Bauchman v. West High School in Salt Lake City, No. C 2:95CV506. On June 2, 1995 the United States District Court for the Central District of Utah issued a preliminary injunction in this case. It enjoined the singing of religious music at a graduation ceremony and insisted on secular music. Notwithstanding the court's order, a student led the assemblage in singing the religious music enjoined. So much for the law-abiding school officials who passively ignored this violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution. It's ordinarily considered a contempt of court. Defendant school officials filed a Notice of Appeal to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals on June 6, 1995. Religion belongs in the church and at home, not in the public schools. Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38 (1985). However, the Republicans elected in 1994 have different ideas; they want compulsory prayer or reading scripture in the nation's public schools. This is state-supported coercion. Adoption of a constitutional amendment is not the only change proposed by the new Republicans. They have already declared war on children and the poor by cutting welfare and nutrition programs. In the elections of 1994, the South emerged again as the nation it once was in the 17th, 18th, 19th and most of the Twentieth centuries. The eleven states of the Old South, the Confederacy, had both a separate culture and institutional problems arising out of its plantation mentality


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before and after the Civil War. These elections shifted political and ideological control of Congress from the Democrats to the Republicans. The new Republicans promised they would reduce the annual deficit and balance the budget by 2002. On June 29, 1995 Congress gave final approval to a seven-year budget plan with the politically risky combination of budgetary austerity and a total of $345 billion in tax cuts over seven years. Whether voters will support reductions in welfare and related antipoverty programs, Medicare, Medicaid, and perhaps Social Security can't be known except for the biennial elections of each year through 2002. Most voters saw these spending reductions as a way of financing the tax cut of $245 billion. With the end of the Cold War in 1989, the United States went through a steep recession. California was hit the hardest because of its many defense industries. Corporate America also discovered restructuring, or downsizing, the notion that companies could profitably produce with fewer employees and more technology. Unemployment was widespread, over 9 percent at its worst. So the United States entered 1994 with job security and stagnating wages as the greatest single issue on the minds of working Americans. In 1995, producing a balanced budget was a high priority item on the Republican agenda. The new Republicans first tried a constitutional amendment mandating a balanced budget, but it failed in the Senate by one vote. Ratification of such an amendment by the states might have postponed Republican disclosure of program cuts. Of necessity, the Republicans then had to identify the programs that had to be either cut or substantially reduced to balance the budget by 2002. Balancing the budget in every year after 2002 seems a worthwhile, but probably impossible objective without another recession. The new Republicans announced that Social Security would be left intact, until it became clear that the Social Security trust fund would run out of money by the year 2013. Congress might even have to reduce their individual pensions to a level used by corporate America. Even corporate welfare was targeted for reduction in a furious race to reduce federal spending. The Republican Congress never laid a glove on corporate welfare; instead, it included some pork in the budget proposal of December, 15, 1995. Medicare and Medicaid, health care programs for the elderly and the poor, were then on the block. Furthermore, the Republican Contract with America promised regulatory reform. This meant amendments to existing laws, such as the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and other environmental measures that had worked well for twenty years or more. The new industry in the South and its agriculture polluted the Mississippi River to the point that persons in the business of netting fish in the Gulf of Mexico and selling them were adversely affected.


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Gutting laws protecting the environment from degradation by corporate America is quite different from what voters wanted in the elections of 1994. So is a drastic change in our legal system as, for example, in ending suits against companies for fraud, or limiting product liability recoveries. Not many voters even foresaw a possible raid on Medicare, nor did they anticipate a substantial tax cut benefiting only the few at the top of the economic heap. By historical accident, however, it is the South that produced members of Congress conservative enough to support all these extravagant proposals. The anecdotal residue of the Civil War continues to influence Southern thinking; the South then had to have slave labor to exist. In the Nineteenth century, the South had seceded from the Union with the shots fired at Fort Sumter in April, 1861. Abraham Lincoln fought to preserve the Union and, in 1862, freed the slaves with his Emancipation Proclamation. The ensuing Civil War ended only in 1865 with General Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomatox. Thereafter, the Reconstruction ruined what was left of the Old South, and it never again arose as a separate "nation" until 1994. According to B.C. Hall and C.T Wood, who collaborated in writing The South published by Scribner in 1995, the Old South included all the states south of the Mason-Dixon Line: Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. West Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland were border states. That is, they were part free and part slave. In their book, the flap copy suggests nostalgia. "There is a nation within the American commonwealth. It is a nation older than the United States....a nation whose icons are sour mash whisky, the Savage Ideal, college football, Good Old Boys, King Cotton, Southern belles, the Lost Cause, and stock car racing." The Lost Cause, of course, was the Civil War. At the rate Southern Democrats re registered as Republicans, the South might again become the "nation" visualized by the authors of this book. Some observers argue that the South ought to be allowed to become a nation on its own. What's left might be more governable, and Gingrich could be Speaker of the Congress in the new Confederation. The United States expanded to the West after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. This purchase more than doubled the land area of the United States. Expansion had its own moral and economic baggage. The slavery issue became a point of controversy so serious that it helped bring about the Civil War in 1861. In 1819, a bill was introduced in the House authorizing the admission of Missouri into the Union as a slave state. But James Talmadge of New York introduced an amendment moving that no more slaves be brought into Missouri. His amendment was rejected in the Senate. The next Congress agreed to a compromise when Maine sought


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admission as a free state. Senator James Thomas of Illinois proposed that with the exception of Missouri, new slave states would not be not be admitted out of the territory included in the Louisiana Purchase north of 360 30' N Latitude. Thus, Missouri became the 24th state on August 10, 1821. After the Mexican War, however, the addition of more territory to the west of the Louisiana Purchase revived the issue of slavery. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act modified the Missouri Compromise in which new slave states could not be created north of 360 30.' In 1842, the United States and Great Britain negotiated the WebsterAshburton Treaty. Both nations committed themselves to the maintenance of naval squadrons off the coast of Africa to stop vessels engaged in the slave trade. However, the language used in Article IX virtually anticipated failure of this effort to end slavery. With the end of the Mexican War in 1848, the United States owned vast stretches of territory without any local government, including New Mexico, Utah, and California. However, gold was discovered in California in 1848, and thousands of would-be capitalists migrated in search of riches. California was admitted as a free state in 1849, while Henry Clay and Daniel Webster offered a compromise. New Mexico and Utah would be admitted to the Union as free states in exchange for the revision by Congress of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. In Jones v. Van Zandt, 46 U.S. 215 (1847), the Supreme Court had upheld a particularly harsh interpretation of the 1793 law. As part of the Compromise of 1850, Congress did revise the 1793 Act, making it even harsher than before. Then, in Scott v. Sandford (Dred Scott Case), 60 U.S. 393 (1857), the Supreme Court held that slaves were property of their owner. Congress had exceeded its authority when it forbade or abolished slavery in territories because no such power could be inferred from the Constitution. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote for a bitterly divided court, and the ensuing violence was predictable, inflaming both sides of the slavery issue. The Dred Scott case triggered violent reactions, unleashing irreconcilable partisan passions that merged with other forces already building toward the coming calamity of the Civil War in 1861. Exactly seventy years earlier, the original thirteen colonies had ratified the first ten amendments to the Constitution of 1789 drafted in Philadelphia. It established the Union the South had attacked in 1861 when it fired on Fort Sumter on April 10 of that year. The Civil War ended in 1865, and reconstruction of the battered and defeated South began. The period between 1865 and 1877 is generally regarded as the Reconstruction era. A Young Readers' History of the Civil


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War, entitled Reconstruction was published by Lodestar Books in 1994 and appears to have been used as a textbook for young readers. It reminds me of a recent book by James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. In 1980, Frances Fitzgerald demonstrated that widely used school textbooks presented simplistic, fatuous, and often inaccurate versions of American history. Random House published her book, America Revised, in 1980. Zak Mettger's Reconstruction does little to advance knowledge and contains several major errors. It begins with a drawing with the caption below noting that "Black men, most of whom had spent their entire lives as slaves, won the right to vote during Reconstruction." In the drawing, one may see a bearded, benevolent black man dropping his ballot in a glass bowl, presumably for later counting. For a brief period, freed slaves had a limited vote, but only in state elections. Even this limited franchise suffered from the Ku Klux Klan and its white-sheeted terrorists. Actually, black Americans did not get the vote in national elections until 1944. Smith v. Allwight, 321 U.S. 649 (1944). Then, on a later page, this passage appears. "The stage was set for a fierce political battle. On one side were the 'Radical Republicans, who believed that the South should not be allowed back into the Union until it granted freedmen full political and civil rights. On the other side were those, including President Andrew Johnson, who favored denying such rights to black Americans and keeping all control in white hands. This battle nearly cost Johnson his presidency." Actually, the House had voted a bill of impeachment. In his trial by the Senate, Johnson missed impeachment by one vote. A slave owner himself, Johnson should have been impeached for blatant racism, a continuation of the war by other means. In any event, young students reading this book were never given a chance to discuss impeachment with teachers, a process that appears in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution. She might have briefly described the origins of America's two-party system. Devoting many pages of her book (45-97), to partisan politics during the Reconstruction, the author left most readers with an erroneous impression. Electoral politics was dominated by two political parties, the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. The former supported a strong federal government, but it died out in 1816 because of its opposition to the War of 1812. However, what was left split into two parties, The conservative Eastern elements of the divided party favored a strong nationalism, protective tariffs, and a national bank. They took the name of National Republicans. The other wing represented the South and the West. It believed in states' rights, tariffs only for revenue, and an independent treasury. It took the name of Democratic, and elected Andrew Jackson in 1828 and 1832. The National Republicans and anti-Jackson factions


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merged to form the Whigs. It was not until 1848 that the Whigs elected a president, Zachary Taylor. During this period of the years between 1848 and 1860, the slavery issue brought about a realignment of the parties, and the Whigs had disappeared, having compromised on slavery. In 1856, a new Republican Party was formed in Ripon, Wisconsin and opposed slavery. Most of the Southern Whigs joined the Democrats, while the Northern Whigs joined the new Republican Party opposed to slavery. In 1860, the Republicans elected Abraham Lincoln. Republicans controlled Congress for 72 years except for the 16 years marked by Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson in the White House during World War I. The Democrats were described as the party of slavery and secession and relegated to the political background until the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 1920, Republican Warren G. Harding was elected president and died in 1923. One of his few constructive accomplishments was establishing the Office of the Budget. Today, it's known as the Office of Management and Budget. Thus, since 1921, the budget of the United States has been the responsibility of the president, subject to Congressional approval. The process begins when the various departments and agencies prepare their appropriation requests, based on expenditures required under existing law and those estimated under new legislation to be proposed by the president. When the budget reaches the House, it is distributed among the subcommittees of the Appropriations Committee. Revenues fall under the jurisdiction of the House Ways and Means Committee. Calvin Coolidge succeeded Harding upon his death in 1923 and was elected president in 1924. Harding had taken office during a depression and promised to enact agricultural measures to help farmers sell their crops. Unfortunately, Congress enacted the Capper Agricultural Credits Act of 1923 and the Fordney-McCumber Act. The latter was the highest tariff in history at the time. Neither act worked well. Harding alienated veterans of World War I by vetoing a veterans' bonus and signed a bill restricting immigration. Harding's Administration was marked by scandal, the Teapot Dome oil matter, and his Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall was indicted and convicted. Calvin Coolidge, as governor of Massachusetts did better by the Republicans, having gained notoriety by using the National Guard to quell a Boston police strike in 1919. "There is no right against the public safety," he said, "by anybody, anywhere, at any time." President Ronald Reagan took a leaf out of Coolidge's book by firing most of the air traffic controllers in 1981. They had only threatened to strike. Coolidge did manage to reduce the national debt by about $1 billion and cut taxes in all income brackets. Coolidge also presided over what historians now


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describe as "Coolidge prosperity." He supported virtually unlimited credit leading to inflation and high corporate profits. In 1928, Coolidge announced he would not seek a second term, so the Republicans nominated Herbert Hoover. He was elected in a landslide, and took office in 1929. Only seven months later, the country was engulfed in a depression that swept the entire world. Hoover was unfairly blamed for the Great Depression which in part was caused by the unlimited credit supported by Coolidge and the Smoot Hawley Tariff of 1930. This tariff was enacted to protect the farmers, and most Western nations retaliated with high tariffs. It merely accelerated the economic decline that began in September 1929 with the stock market crash of that year. Many people buying stocks on margin were wiped out by margin calls, and those with cash were afraid to spend it. By 1932, stocks sold at 10 percent of their 1929 value. Bank failures wiped out those with cash on deposit, and mortgage foreclosures wiped out most farmers. Widespread poverty and unemployment were to continue until 1940. In that year, the Arms for Democracy program helped stimulate the manufacture of military weapons and ships. The United States had begun a program of assistance to help Great Britain and France with arms to resist Adolf Hitler's Nazis after 1939 and the outbreak of World War II. Franklin Roosevelt was Governor of New York and saw the ravages of the depression at first hand. Some of his biographers have argued he decided to run for president, because Hoover was doing nothing to help those in need, farmers and people who lost their homes via bank foreclosures. In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in a landslide, defeating Hoover by 472 electoral votes to Hoover's 59 votes. Roosevelt took office on March 4, 1933 and quickly initiated programs that would shape the form of government for the next sixty-five years. They included the Social Security Act of 1935, the National Labor Relations [Wagner] Act of 1936, the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933.

Franklin D. Roosevelt The 1932 Election.

One of the outstanding books about this period in our history is The Great Depression: America in the 1930s by Tom H. Watkins and Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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published in 1993 by Little, Brown & Company. It is copiously illustrated and was the foundation of a film series by PBS. Watkins believed that the New Deal was just the sort of activist, federal government that most people want today. He may not harbor quite the same feelings after the 1994 elections. They transferred control of Congress to the Republicans for the first time in forty years. During this interregnum, five Republicans served as president for a total of twenty-eight years; Dwight Eisenhower (8), Richard Nixon (6), Gerald Ford (2), Ronald Reagan (8) and George Bush (4). In his book, Mr. Watkins revived memories. In addition to the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression and the utter misery of its victims , the United States suffered the greatest drought in its history. "....day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year of little or no rain," he wrote, "until by 1935 they [the farmers] were facing ruin in a world ruled by the mocking oppression of dust.... In 1934, nearly 30 percent of all Americans still lived on farms, and a good part of how the nation viewed itself was rooted in its agricultural traditions and experience....During just one [dust] storm between May 9 and May 11, 1934, an estimated 350 million tons of soil disappeared in the West and reappeared in the East. Chicago got four pounds of it for every person in the city, and Washington, New York, Boston, and other cities burned their street lamps in the middle of the day....People began to leave the home states in growing numbers after the terrible summer of 1934...Throughout the Plains states, 2.5 million people would ultimately leave for other parts." See pp 189-195 for text omitted. The Okies and the Arkies were on the move, and a lot of them took dirty, battered automobiles and their families for the drive to the promise of California. California was not exactly a hospitable state. In 1937, its Legislature enacted the "Okie Law." It made it a misdemeanor for any person, firm or corporation to bring an "indigent person" not a resident of California into the state. The Supreme Court of the United States unanimously held this statute was "an unconstitutional barrier to interstate commerce." Edwards v. California, 314 U.S. 160 (1941). "The right to move freely from state to state, "Justice Byrnes wrote, "is an incident of national citizenship protected by the privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment against state interference." Literature of the time included John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (1939), a moving chronicle of the Joad family. Its members left their foreclosed farm in Oklahoma for the dim misery and violence of the migrant workers in California. Darryl Zanuck of Twentieth Century Fox made a film of this book, and Henry Fonda played the lead. It was a cinematic masterpiece, and Franklin Roosevelt reportedly arranged a showing at the White House in 1940.


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Ever since 1880, the Supreme Court had been the arbiter of the place of labor unions in American life. All this changed with the New Deal, even after the court had sanctioned the use of injunctions to break strikes. In re Debs, 158 U.S. 564 (1895). Thereafter, unions fought an all out war to gain recognition by corporate employers. The Ford Motor Company even used professional strike breakers as late as 1933. In 1932, Congress enacted the Norris-Laguardia Act prohibiting injunctive relief in labormanagement disputes. Finally, the Supreme Court upheld the National Labor Relations Act in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, 301 U.S. 1 (1937). And the court also held that picketing by unions was speech protected by the First Amendment. Hague v. Congress of Industrial Organizations, 307 U.S. 496 (1937). The New Deal policies of Franklin Roosevelt attracted millions of Americans bankrupted by the nationwide poverty of the Great Depression. Black voters, whose loyalties were to the Republicans since Lincoln, moved into the Democratic Party together with union members and the disenfranchised poor. This New Deal coalition continued to dominate the presidency after Roosevelt's death in 1945 when Harry Truman succeeded to the presidency. Truman was reelected president in 1948. Except for two sessions in 1947-48 and 1953-54, this coalition controlled Congress until 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected. Reagan served two terms and George Bush became president in 1988, only to lose to Bill Clinton in 1992. The Reconstruction period had left its mark on both parties, Republicans and Democrats alike. While Democrats were the party of slavery for years after the Reconstruction, many of those elected to Congress during the Twentieth Century were considered conservative enough to qualify as Republicans; they were sometimes known as Dixiecrats. In 1948, for example, Southern Democrats rebelled against the civil rights policies of the Democrats and nominated Strom Thurmond as their candidate. He lost, but in 1968, George Wallace, governor of Alabama and a Southern symbol of resistance to desegregation of public schools, ran as the candidate of the American Independent Party. Harry Ashmore described Wallace in his book, Civil Rights and Wrongs, published by Pantheon Books in 1994. "...the heart of his appeal was unabashedly racist, feeding on the resentment of those in the lowerincome brackets who saw government-assisted improvement in the lot of blacks as a threat to their own [rights]." Wallace lost in 1968, but got the largest number of popular votes ever given a third-party candidate, 9,606,000. Had Wallace not run, Hubert Humphrey, a Democrat, would probably have defeated Richard Nixon, a Republican. Alternatively, the election of 1968 might have been decided in the House, where each state has one vote in accordance with Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution. If


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no candidate for president has a majority in the Electoral College, the House may choose the president. Finally, the last chapter in this children's book about the Reconstruction dealt with its legacy. Zak Mettger wrote: "By the end of the nineteenth century few signs remained of the great conflict that had taken place in the South more than thirty years earlier." The author did, to her credit, discuss Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). The 100th anniversary of this wretched decision was in 1996 on May 18. In this case, the court merely gave segregation of the races its judicial blessing in the South and the opportunity to legislate cradle to the grave segregation. It was not expressly overruled until 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). In this case, the Supreme Court had held that separate but equal schools were a denial of equal protection. Enforcement of this rule was left to the courts, so it did not once again divide the Union as the Civil War had. The South still resists compliance with the Supreme Court's orders to desegregate its public schools "with all deliberate speed." The Union had arisen out of the ashes of the Articles of Confederation that itself had followed the Revolutionary War. This war began with British refusal to allow the colonies to govern themselves despite the Declaration of Independence of 1776. It did not end until 1781. General Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown in Tidewater Virginia. It is no accident that the first five presidents of the United States were all slave owners. Indeed, slavery was recognized in the Constitution itself by Article I, Section 2. In part, this read: "Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons including those bound to service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons..." Thus, the decennial Census included indentured persons, but excluded Indians who were treated as neither free nor slaves. Indians were the victims of American expansion to the west and mercilessly harassed by armed forces of the United States. Native Americans were also the victims of settlers in the western territories for over a hundred years. They were finally driven into reservations where their rights were established by various treaties. Most of these treaties were simply ignored by administration after administration until even today they are confined to reservations, or so-called tribal nations. There is a widespread but erroneous belief that what is now the United States was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492. Actually, there is evidence that the Vikings were here first, even though the evidence of their presence in the year 1000 is found in Newfoundland. Where


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Columbus first landed is thought to be one of the Caribbean islands. However, he made a second trip to the New World and landed in Haiti. Here, he killed most of the indigenous Indians and sent many of them back to Europe as slaves. Most of those not killed by Columbus died from diseases imported from Europe. In 1992, David E. Stannard wrote a book published by the Oxford University Press, American Holocaust: the Conquest of the New World. One of Stannard's targets was the myths surrounding Christopher Columbus. An idea of what Stannard described appears on page x of his Prologue. "The destruction of the Indians of the Americas -- Hispaniola -- was," he wrote, "far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world." Columbus and some of his European contemporaries, as well as American settlers moving westward after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 must bear the responsibility for this American Holocaust. Florida was discovered by Ponce de Leon in 1513 and settled by Spaniards over the following years. By courtesy of Charles V, Hernando de Soto was appointed governor of what is now Florida. He arrived in Florida in 1539 and later set out on his expedition through Florida into Georgia and Alabama to the Mississippi. In 1562, French Huguenots fled from religious persecution in France and established a small settlement near the St. Johns River. Various wars in Europe were settled there with effects in the New World. By its treaty in 1763, Spain gave up Florida to England in exchange for Cuba. During the Revolutionary War in the United States, England returned Florida to Spain in 1778. By the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819, Spain ceded all Florida to the United States in return for a promise in Washington to relinquish any claim it had to Texas. However, in 1960, the United States brought an original action against several states. United States v. Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, 363 U.S. 1 (1960) seeking a declaration with respect to title to minerals, such as oil. In its opinion, which took judicial notice of ancient records, the court said: "Texas, the only one of the defendant states, which had the status of an independent nation immediately prior to its admission, contends it had a three-league maritime boundary which 'existed at the time [it] became a member of the union in 1845.... Texas declared its independence from Mexico on March 2, 1836...In March 1837 this country recognized the Republic of Texas. On April 25, 1838 the United States entered into a convention with the Republic to establish a boundary between the two countries and to provide for a survey of part of it. On April 12, 1844 President Tyler concluded a Treaty of Annexation with the Republic, but on June 8, 1844 the Senate refused to ratify it. On March 1, 1845 President Tyler signed a Joint Resolution of Congress annexing Texas...Pursuant to this Resolution, the


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people of Texas adopted a constitution, Const. 1854 Vernon's Ann. St., which was submitted to Congress. By Joint Resolution of December 29, 1845, Texas was admitted to the Union in accordance with the terms of the previous Joint Resolution..." The court further traced the claims made by Texas and the United States, mentioning that the original boundary of Texas was in breach of the Treaty of Paris in 1806 and might have overstated the amount of land claimed by Texas. It had enacted its own Boundary Act in 1836. After Texas had consented to annexation and had been admitted to the Union, Mexico sent its army to recover what it had lost by annexation. President Polk requested Congress to declare war against Mexico to repel this invasion of a state of the United States. In a later message to Congress, Polk explained that the peace treaty proposed by Mexico required "the United States to dismember Texas..." However, Polk had sent a commissioner to Mexico to negotiate peace with instructions containing language later incorporated into the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as finally signed on February 2, 1848. The boundary line of this treaty conformed in every respect with the boundary claimed by Texas. This boundary was reaffirmed in the Gadsden Treaty of 1853. With this historical background, it seems reasonable to say the United States fixed the boundaries of Texas based on its cartographic aggression against Mexico. Furthermore, the court scarcely mentioned the 1821 treaty under which the United States relinquished any claim it might have to Texas. It had not then acquired the status of an independent nation. Other states were to be created by actual aggression on the part of the United States. New Mexico, a Spanish province was one of them, having been forcibly seized by American armed forces in 1846. The Territory of New Mexico was created two years later by the Compromise of 1850. Arizona was carved out of this territory ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. The Gadsden Purchase of this territory from Mexico established the southern boundary of what is now New Mexico in 1853. The northeastern section of the New Mexico Territory was annexed in 1861 by the new Colorado Territory, and it was further reduced in 1863 when the Territory of Arizona was created. In 1947, the Supreme Court had dealt with ownership of oil and gas rights in the submerged lands up to three miles off California's coast. United States v. California, 332 U.S. 19 (1947). The court rejected California's claim, notwithstanding it was admitted to the Union in 1849 "on an equal footing with the original thirteen states in all respects whatever." However, Justice Black, writing for the court, noted that "neither the English charters granted to this nation's settlers, nor the Treaty of Peace with England in 1793 showed a purpose to set apart a three-mile ocean belt for colonial or state ownership." Since the court did not discuss


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California's history as support for its decision, other sources were used, eg., Tiara: Treaties and International Agreements of the United State Researchers' Archive on a CD-ROM published in 1993 by Oceana Publications, Inc. What is now California, once a Spanish, then a Mexican territory was ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 following the Mexican War. In 1853, Article XII was repealed by the Gadsden Treaty and replaced with a boundary description. In 1845, John Fremont led a military expedition to northern California, encouraging American settlers there to rebel against Mexican rule. Proclaiming a republic, California was admitted to the Union in 1849. Ten years later, the Legislative body in Sacramento voted unanimously to divide the State to create two states. Accounts of this appeared in the Sacramento Bee, a newspaper still in existence. Article IV, Section 3 of the Constitution, however, requires the consent of Congress. Thus, when the Civil War began in 1861, the entire project was abandoned. Getting Congress to consent then appeared out of the question with war in the offing. With the end of the Civil War in 1865, Congress approved amendments to the Constitution -- the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments; these were ratified by the states. During this period lasting well into the Twentieth Century, territorial expansion continued as well as the movement west of Americans. They simply pushed the Indians aside to make room for the settlers. Freed slaves and many black Americans moved north fleeing from the South and its repressive, discriminatory practices. Talent came with them. During the period between 1867 and 1920, many black Americans migrated to the urban centers of the country, New York, Washington, Boston, Chicago, and Baltimore. With them, these migrants brought their art and musical talents. New York rapidly became the cultural capital of America. Ann Douglas has written a monumental work of some 600 pages, Terrible Honesty, chronicling the rise of music, art, theater, literature, and vaudeville in New York, complete with an extensive bibliography and an index. It was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1995. Douglas directed her principal attention to the 1920s, writing about luminaries in her world like W.B. E. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Bessie Smith, Ella Fitzgerald, Franklin P. Adams, H.L. Mencken, Louis Amstrong, Duke Ellington, and Scott Fitzgerald to name only a few. In her own words, Douglas described why she wrote about this period. "My book," she wrote, "is an attempt to describe, first, the larger American emancipation and then, the African-American movement of liberation within it. Only a 'World City' is vast enough to welcome extreme ethnic and racial diversity and concoct the brew of blasé tolerance and vividly random curiosity that is the New York style." She also mentions reformer


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Carrie Chapman Catt. She enlisted a president as her ally and women got the vote in 1920 with ratification by the states of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, so the country was moving rapidly to expand. Except for the Alaska Purchase of 1867 and admission of this state and Hawaii, westward expansion of the United States was complete by 1957, even though some states were not admitted to the Union until 1912, such as New Mexico. All hostilities with Spain had not ended during the 19th Century. War in Cuba began with its struggle for independence. Spurred by the inflammatory journalism of the Hearst press, the public was appalled by the brutality of Spanish rule in Cuba. By 1896, there were demands for intervention in the war between Spain and Cuba. When riots broke out in Havana, the United States sent its battleship, the USS Maine, to protect the considerable interests of Americans. It was promptly sunk in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898. President McKinley sent an ultimatum to Spain. It was rejected, so the president asked Congress to authorize the dispatch to Cuba of armed forces "to secure a full and final termination of hostilities between Spain and Cuba," possibly the first time any president of the United States had ever intervened in a war between two foreign states. The war was fought on two fronts, the other being in the Philippines, then a Spanish possession. Spain asked France to help end hostilities, and the formal peace negotiations were held in Paris. By the treaty, Spain granted Cuba its full independence, and the United States acquired Puerto Rico and Guam. President McKinley reluctantly agreed to annex the Philippines. It was a dreadful mistake. The United States had to fight a three-year guerilla war in which for the first time genocide was used to describe the killing of an estimated 600,000 Filipinos by armed forces of the United States. Mark Twain was one of the fiercest critics of this phase of the war and wrote a powerful essay, "To the Person Sitting in Darkness." In it, he stated that "the American flag should have the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by skull and crossbones." There was only one positive note struck in this war with Spain. It made the construction of the Panama Canal inevitable to accommodate the needs of a two-ocean Navy. This international waterway was completed in 1914. Coincidentally, 1914 was also the year in which Europe was at war with Germany. Barbara Tuchman has written two books, The Proud Tower and The Guns of August, both recommended for historians writing about World War I. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson, a racist president, ran for reelection with the statement that he had kept the United States "out of war." However, in 1917, after the sinking of the Lusitania and other provocations, the United States declared war on Germany. The surrender of Germany on November 11, 1919, left a defeated country. It was compelled by the Treaty of Versailles to pay heavy reparations.


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These, in turn, led to wildly uncontrolled inflation and the beginning of the rise to power in 1933 of Adolf Hitler and Nazism. Hitler became Chancellor of all Germany in 1934. During the 1930s, Hitler annexed Austria and demanded more. He wanted the Sudetenland then part of Czechoslovakia. England's Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, flew to Munich to negotiate with Hitler and returned with a document that he waved while stepping down from his plane in London. "Peace in our time," he announced. Less than a year later, Europe was at war with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, led by Benito Mussolini. Hitler's Nazis launched Germany into World War II and the Holocaust, in which approximately 6 million Jews were killed in various death camps scattered around Germany and Poland. On the other side of the world, Japanese troops invaded and occupied the Philippines with the outbreak of war on December 7, 1941. British-held Singapore was also overrun by Japanese troops, as was Indonesia for its oil to fuel the army's aircraft and ships, as well as autos on the home island of Hokkaido. World War II did not finally end until the surrender of Japan in 1945. President Harry Truman, who succeeded Roosevelt on his death in 1945, had authorized the use of atomic bombs, one on Hiroshima and another on Nagasaki. In 1995, the Smithsonian Institution sought to revive the issue of their use, assigning part of the blame for the war with Japan on "American imperialism. "This revision of history so enraged veterans' groups and other survivors of the war, that the Smithsonian Institution backtracked and left history intact. The presence of the United States in the Philippines until 1947, when this island nation was granted its independence, was to place the United States in the way of Japanese expansion during the 1930s. This had fateful consequences. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war against Japan and the Axis powers, Adolf Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. After the greatest war in history, General Dwight Eisenhower accepted the surrender of Germany in May, 1945. General Douglas McArthur presided at the surrender in Tokyo on the battleship, the USS Missouri. In the same year, delegates from some fifty nations had convened in San Francisco to negotiate the terms of the United Nations in treaty form. The Senate of the United States ratified this treaty in 1946. The United Nations now has about 180 nations as members. In the early years of its existence, its General Assembly adopted a number of resolutions on human rights. They include: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948; the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights of January 16, 1966; the


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International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide -- not ratified by the Senate until 1988 -- of December 9, 1948; the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.Then, on December 21, 1965; the General Assembly approved the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

Another war in which the United States committed American troops to combat was the Vietnam War. Beginning in 1961, President Kennedy began to send military advisors to Saigon to explore the question whether local Vietnamese forces could, by training, be brought up to the level of expertise required to fight a guerilla war against troops from Hanoi. His Secretary of Defense was Robert S. McNamara, one of the so-called Whiz Kids at the Ford Motor Company. In 1995, he completed and Times Books published his memoirs, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. This book had unanticipated consequences, since it revived all the anger of those sent to Vietnam and were lucky enough to have survived. Some 58,000 Americans and over a million Vietnamese died in this bloody conflict. McNamarra now says "Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."

US Army helicopters in Vietnam

Robert McNamara was wrong from the very beginning of his term as Secretary of Defense. President Kennedy who had just been found wrong in the Bay of Pigs Cuban disaster was not well served by his new man at the Pentagon. On pp 32-33, McNamara wrote "The irony of this gap -Asian experts -- was that it existed largely because the top East Asian and China experts in the State Department -- John Paton Davies, Jr., John Stewart Service, and John Carter Vincent -- had been purged during the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s. Without men like these to provide sophisticated, nuanced insights, we -- certainly I -- badly misread China's objectives and mistook its bellicose rhetoric to imply a drive for regional Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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hegemony." Blaming others for his mistakes was a theme appearing in McNamarra's book throughout its pages. The late and unlamented Senator Joseph McCarthy (Rep. Wisc.) was seen by McNamara as the person with the responsibility for this purge of the State Department. However, there were many experts in America's universities fully capable of advising McNamara about pitfalls in Vietnam. Elected to the Senate in 1946, McCarthy must bear the responsibility for ruining the careers of many innocent people by naming them as Communists without a shred of evidence to support his unprincipled and vicious charges. His activities and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) left behind them a trail of ruined lives and some who went to jail for contempt of Congress. They had asserted the First Amendment in their defense. In Kent v. Dulles, 357 U.S. 116 (1958), the Supreme Court held that the State Department could not deny passports to Americans alleged to be communists. The right of Americans to travel across national frontiers was a part of the "liberty" protected by the Fifth Amendment. Eight years later, however, the court held that restrictons on travel to certain countries were still permissible. Zemel v. Rusk, 381 U.S. 1 (1965). Even today, echoes of the Red Scare may still be heard. During the 1988 presidential campaign, George Bush reminded voters almost daily that Michael Dukakis was a "card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union," equating the ACLU with subversion. In 1993, Fortune magazine assailed a Clinton nominee, Lani Guinier, for being related to her father, a "devotee of Joseph Stalin." In any event, the war in Vietnam was widely seen, at least in the very beginning, as a war against Communism. The late Barbara Tuchman, author of numerous books, including March of Folly, had a view quite different from McNamarra's. In this book, she included three chapters all entitled "America Betrays Herself in Vietnam." She noted that President Truman was the first president to send advisors to Vietnam. They were designated as the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) which grew to include 200 men advising the French how to use American military hardware. The advice was resented and finally ignored. Barbara Tuchman listed dozens of experts that McNamara could have consulted before any decisions were made by President Kennedy. The list was long and had many well-informed East Asian and China experts. She also mentioned university professors in the United States who might disabuse McNamara of his obvious illusions in a country that never really showed the enthusiasm or will to rise to American expectations.


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Search and Destroy Mission Bien Hoa, Vietnam

The regime in Saigon was corrupt, something McNamara could have learned for himself. Ho Chi Minh was a Vietnamese nationalist rebelling against French colonialism, a fact that no one in authority could possibly fathom. The Chinese knew this and capitalized on their knowledge. The ever-present CIA even carried on illegal operations in Vietnam, made illegal by the Geneva Agreement of 1954. As Tuchman says many times, neither Kennedy nor Lyndon Johnson ever had a realistic formulation of clear objectives, Both, including McNamara, were mesmerized by their anti-Communist stance on virtually all policy decisions. Johnson was to lose his presidency because he failed to see the consequences of his own actions. He announced in 1968 that he would not seek reelection, thus abandoning the field to Richard Nixon. Elected in 1968, Nixon authorized the secret bombing of Cambodia. Anger spiraled out of control, even to the point where four students at Kent State University were killed by panic-stricken National Guard personnel. In 1974, Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment arising out of his role in the Watergate scandal. See United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683 (1974) for a full explication of his misdeeds. This decision was a major constitutional landmark. It established the conditional nature of presidential immunity, bringing in as it did, the extravagant assertions of Nixon's lawyers. They claimed presidential power to be unlimited. A unanimous court disagreed. His successor in office was Gerald Ford who promptly pardoned Nixon. However, Ford finally settled Vietnam. in 1975 on terms less than satisfactory to the United States. This country had been defeated by Ho Chi Minh's ragtag army and its persistence. In 1996, President Clinton authorized limited diplomatic relations with a reunited Vietnam. In the last fifteen years, the country has had to deal with secrecy in the way foreign policy was made based on the old colonial theory that the United States must deal with the leaders of other countries as somehow benign and troubled by the presence of Communists in their midst. All that is really needed is a program to provide urban renewal, the infrastructure to support it, such as better housing, waste disposal and clean water, political and economic freedom and a police force, rather than the corrupt


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rule of the military, better agriculture by land reform and technical assistance to make it all work. El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Haiti are examples of this approach to policy. Noam Chomsky has recently written a book entitled World Orders Old and New published in 1994 by the Columbia University Press. Mr. Chomsky has written this book as a radical critique of America's post-Cold War role in the world, though he describes a halfmillennium of global domination by the West. He challenges traditional policies and unmasks illegitimate authority. Nicaragua, and American intervention in that Latin American nation was a case in point. In the early 1980s, Nicaragua was challenging Haiti for the unwanted distinction of being the most destitute country in the Western hemisphere. In 1979, President Anastasio Somoza Debayle was overthrown by local nationalists, ie., guerillas under the leadership of Augusto Sandino. The Sandinistas established a government not welcomed by the United States. The new government had an estimated 200 Cuban military advisers and sent some of its pilots to Cuba for flight training in obsolete Soviet Migs. According to Robert Gates, the Sandinistas were also sending arms to El Salvador, at the time a right wing military dictatorship with death squads. Gates' recent book, From the Shadows, relates the role played by the CIA in Nicaragua. "These right wing death squads," Gates wrote, "had killed a number of opponents of the military government in El Salvador since the 1970s, and their murder of Archbishop Romero and later of four Catholic nuns evoked outrage in the United States." Interdiction of arms flowing from Nicaragua to El Salvador was only one plot initiated by Casey who recommended a Sandinista defector, Eden Pastora, operating out of Costa Rica do the job. Any glimpse at a map would show that El Salvador and Costa Rico were separated by Nicaragua. Bobby Inman, then Deputy Director, wondered "how Pastora's actions in Costa Rica could be aimed at interdiction of weapons flowing from Nicaragua to El Salvador...." Gates also faulted Reagan for being unable or unwilling to establish a domestic constituency in support of overt action against Nicaragua. So, according to Gates, the only realistic option was CIA-directed covert operations. The late William Casey, then Director of the CIA planned an outrageous covert operation in 1983. He authorized the mining of Nicaraguan waters, and a firestorm of media criticism occurred when some nine vessels, one of them Russian, were damaged by these mines. The war on drugs has become an issue in the presidential campaign of 1996. Statistics seem to show a growing use of substance abuse amongst teenagers. The origins of the war on drugs were part of the Contra war against Nicaragua beginning in 1979. Allegations of links between drug traffickers and the Contras were aired in 1986 by the Senate Committee


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Report on Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, chaired by Senator John Kerry. The report also noted that Reagan's Department of Justice "...was slow to respond to these allegations..." Furthermore, the CIA "...categorically denied that the Neutrality Act violations... had in fact taken place... In fact, the FBI had already assembled substantial information confirming the Neutrality Act violations... had taken place" The full report of this Senate Committee -- some 25 pages -- makes for interesting reading now that Senator Dole has opened the Pandorra's box on drugs and their origin outside the United States. Casey's CIA was determined to overthrow the Sandinista government. Predictably, the CIA saw the Sandinistas as communists. Secretary of State George Schultz saw the problem differently. If national security was involved, we should send in the marines. If it were merely tending to our backyard, then the United States should pursue a political solution.In 1984, Daniel Ortega Saavedra was elected president of Nicaragua, and the United States resorted to efforts to destabilize the Sandinista government. A civil war ensued in which Washington backed the opposition to the Sandinistas, the so-called Contras. President Reagan, a militant anti-Communist, described the Contras as "freedom fighters," when in fact many of the Contras were Somoza supporters. Reagan's attitude was no better than the institutional myopia in Washington. Its bureaucrats opposed any development in Nicaragua antithetical to corporate America's interests. Finally, Reagan allowed Nicaraguan policy to get out of control. That country sued the United States in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), a court established by the United Nations. This action charged the United States with numerous violations of international law and of the Charter itself. The United States argued that the ICJ was without jurisdiction to entertain the suit captioned Case Concerning Military and Paramilitary Activities in and Against Nicaragua. The text of the court's ruling on the merits appears at 25 International Legal Materials 1023 (1988). The text is a stunning indictment of American policy with respect to Nicaragua. The United States was in clear violation of Article 2 (4) of the United Nations Charter. Among other things, American mercenaries mined Nicaraguan harbors, intervened in the internal affairs of Nicaragua, committed aerial trespass into Nicaragua's airspace, infringed on freedom of the seas, and killed and/or kidnapped citizens of Nicaragua. In the economic field, the United States withdrew foreign aid to Nicaragua, drastically reduced Nicaragua's sugar quota, imposed a trade embargo and used its influence in the Inter American Bank for Reconstruction and Development to block loans requested by Nicaragua. The ICJ awarded


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Nicaragua reparations to be paid by the United States for the wrongs committed by it. They were never paid. However, in 1993 the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, both virtually controlled by the United States, presented new demands of unusaul severity to Nicaragua. Noam Chomsky's book, World Orders Old and New, summarized them in part. "Unlike many others, Nicaragua will receive no relief from its crushing debt. It must eliminate credits from the Bank of Industry and Commerce, one of the remaining state banks, and privatize enterprises and government operations. These included such services as postal, energy, and water to ensure that poor people really feel the pain -- they are for example unable to give their children water to drink, if they cannot pay, thanks to 60 percent unemployment. Nicaragua must also cut public expenditures by $60 million, eliminating what little remains of health and welfare services -- a figure that was selected for its symbolic value; that was the sum shipped out of Nicaragua during the previous year by the already privatized banks." The other side of this coin shows a callous disregard for what happens in Nicaragua. In September, 1993 the Senate voted 94-4 to ban any aid to Nicaragua if it failed to return or provide compensation for the properties seized when Somoza was ousted. In fact, Nicaragua is probably bankrupt. When the Sandinistas ousted Somoza, they never anticipated financing a war against the retread Somozans and American mercenaries who also happened to get financial help from Iran indirectly via Washington. Oliver North was involved in an unsuccessful and probably illegal effort to get the hostages in Lebanon released. The terrorists were in Beirut, and their operations were financed by Iran. He has never told the entire story of the Iran-Contra affair. One of George Bush's last acts upon leaving office was to pardon all those involved in this scandal. One of the difficulties encountered by historians is governmental reluctance to disclose accurate information in cases not covered by any of the exemptions of the Freedom of Information Act. A recent case is instructive. American Historical Association et al v. Trudy Peterson, Acting Archivist, 876 F. Supp.1305 (DC 1995). Before leaving office, George Bush worked out an agreement with Wilson, the Archivist dealing with disclosure of certain computer-generated files. The District Court held that the Bush Wilson Agreement could not be sustained under the Presidential Records Act or Article II of the Constitution. See also Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President, 1 F.3rd 1274 (D.C. Cir. 1993). That case dealt with the status of records under the Federal Records Act. There, the Court of Appeals held that all backup tapes and computer hard drives containing data from electronic


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communications used by the National Security Council and White House Situation Room staff during the Bush Administration were improperly withheld. These NSC backup tapes were held subject to the court's injunction "to the extent that they were not created solely to advise and assist the president." Before he left office on January 20, 1993 President Bush pardoned all the defendants either awaiting trial in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra scandal or actually convicted. Historians and scholars might find a gold mine of information were the records of this shabby affair released for examination. Using the Freedom of Information Act is not always productive. An estimated 60 percent of all District Court judges have been appointed by Presidents Reagan and Bush. In cases that might reflect unfavorably on either, the result is often in doubt. Senator Dole has announced he would make a campaign issue out of Clinton's judicial appointments; they are too "liberal" claimed Dole. The courts of the United States sometimes have a way of appearing dedicated to the agenda of a particular judge, or Justice in the Supreme Court. The most recent such case was United States v. Lopez, 115 S. Ct. 1624 (1995). Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote for the majority. He held that the Gun Free School Zones Act "exceeds the authority of Congress to regulate commerce," citing the absence or inadequacy of an administrative record to support its enactment. This law made it a felony to carry a gun within 1000 feet of a public school. In effect, Chief Justice Rehnquist said we will not look at the statute unless Congressional intent is ambiguous. However, in several places in his opinion, he chose to castigate the dissenting opinion of Associate Justice Steven Breyer, the newest member of the court. Evidently, Justice Breyer had the temerity to disagree with the Chief Justice, although this dissent was elegant. The Chief Justice had missed the point of Justice Breyer's trenchant opinion. In an earlier case, Chief Justice Rehnquist had placed his own agenda on public display in Nolan v. City of Tigard, Oregon, 114 S. Ct. 2309 (1994). In a 5-4 decision, he converted an essentially environmental issue into a Fifth Amendment "taking" requiring compensation to the person whose property was "taken" for a public use. The City Planning Commission of Tigard, Oregon had imposed legally required environmental conditions on a proposal to expand a hardware store owned by Florence Dolan, Petitioner. Both the State Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court of Oregon sided with the city, but not the Chief Justice. Almost casually, he reversed the Planning Commission and two state appellate courts. For about forty years, the environment has had a long and distinguished history of surviving attacks on it by corporate America. Virtually every


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major public utility has at one time or another has been a defendant in actions under the Clean Air Act. These companies have aggressively resisted compliance with this and other laws enacted by Congress since 1968. Almost without exception, they have lost, paying fines or being enjoined from any further violations of law. The Clean Water Act of 1972 is under attack now, not by those who pollute rivers and streams, but by Congress itself. Another law enacted by Congress is in danger of repeal, the Endangered Species Act (ESA). It has been used by environmental groups, such as the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund to halt clear cutting old-growth timber stands in Washington, Oregon, and California. The Northern Spotted Owl, specifically protected by the ESA, has been more than a symbol of resistance to this practice which leaves grotesque areas barren of any trees. The result has caused soil erosion to the detriment of agriculture and commercial fisheries. The soil is washed down hills by normal rainfall and fills streams. Fish may no longer swim upstream to spawn, and with virtually no topsoil left, the land cannot support agriculture. In mid-May, 1995 the National Academy of Sciences issued a timely report concerning the Endangered Species Act. "To sustain a viable future for our descendents," this report said, "we must find ways to preserve both species and ecosystems. The Endangered Species Act is a critically important part of our efforts. Any coherent, successful program to prevent species' extinction and to protect the nation's biological diversity is going to require more enlightened commitments on the part of all major parties to achieve success." The report continued: "Because habitat plays such an important biological role in endangered species' survival, some core amount of essential habitat should be designated for protection at the time of listing a species as endangered, as an emergency stopgap measure. It should be identified without reference to economic impact." The panel convened in 1992 by the scientific advisory council at the request of Congress, included 17 experts on various disciplines. It was headed by Michael T. Clegg, a geneticist who is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of California at Riverside. Agricultural pesticides are often toxic, and in the lower Mississippi River, agricultural pesticides have so polluted this river that there is a huge and growing area in the Gulf of Mexico in which fish cannot survive. This pollution killed off the local commercial fishing industry that offers shrimp to the public. Corporate America has also polluted the air, water and earth with toxic wastes from radioactive residue from defense plants that manufacture the plutonium for nuclear weapons. Even disposal of radioactive uranium rods from power plants has proved nearly impossible. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has listed priority sites scheduled for cleanup at a cost determined by the Comprehensive


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Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA), another Act of Congress. California's Central Valley has recently been in the news. A toxic chemical used in some pesticides has been found infiltrating water wells and springs used by humans. The water used in this huge agricultural area may be so polluted it is no longer usable, for either agriculture or human consumption. Environmental organizations have studied how best to secure equal environmental justice for minorities in poor and urban areas polluted by nearby industry. The inhabitants suffer in silence; they are too poor to move elsewhere or to sue the company. I saw one paper mill in West Point, Virginia earlier in 1995. It has been there emitting hazardous sulphur fumes since 1937. About half the population of West Point is black. Equal justice under the law is the birthright of every American; it is the legal equivalent of a human right. Over the last three decades, the protection of the environment from degradation has become a necessity so widely recognized that environmental concerns have pervaded most fields of international law, including the international law of human rights. But not in the United States which consistently ignores even fundamental human rights. The United Nations Charter and various resolutions demand more from its member states. China, for example, demanded most favored nation status for trade purposes, but its leaders refused to even acknowledge its flagrant violations within China itself. In Tibet, a country it occupied in 1950, Chinese troops killed off large numbers of its Buddhist population. Political dissidents within China are routinely imprisoned for speech considered offensive to its leaders and the Communist Central Committee which decrees the norms of political discourse. Some of those students present at the June demonstration in Tiannamen Square in 1989 are still in jail. High unemployment, inflation, and official corruption in China still exist as of mid-1995, and China still exports products of child and prison labor. On May 28, 1993, however, President Clinton, while mentioning these abuses of human rights by China, did not terminate that country's Most Favored Nation (MFN) status. Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord rationalized this decision by saying in part, "The objective is to use MFN in an effort to make progress with the Chinese on the key issues [human rights, piracy of intellectual property rights, the occupation of Tibet and the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty] and particularly in human rights where we have little other leverage except diplomatic pressures." In the session following this press release, Mr. Lord was quite evasive in responding to questions put by individual members of the White House


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press corps. The entire transcript may be retrieved from the America Online (AOL) database. In 1994 and 1995, President Clinton once again renewed China's MFN status. Congress may terminate MFN in 1996, and there may be enough votes to override a Clinton veto. Ever since its recognition of China in 1978, the United States had walked a precarious line with Chinese rulers in Beijing. By agreement with China, the United States did not recognize Taiwan. Beijing claimed this offshore island as its own territory. When its president had requested a visa to attend a Cornell reunion in 1995, President Clinton's State Department treated the request as one for a private, not an official visit. Beijing was so angry, it threatened unspecified retaliation if Taiwan's president was allowed to visit the United States. In 1992, Beijing reacted violently to a campaign speech by President George Bush. In Texas, Bush promised to deliver some jet fighter aircraft to Taiwan in violation of the agreement between the United States and the Peoples' Republic of China (PRC). Its leaders in Beijing threatened retaliation on the grounds the sale of military aircraft to Taiwan was prohibited by agreement. Amongst other things, Article 7 of the Agreement for cooperation concerning the peaceful use of nuclear energy [with China and ratified by the United States in 1985] provided that: "Each party shall endeavor to avoid taking any action that effects cooperation under this agreement. If either party at any time following entry into force of this agreement does not comply with the provisions of this agreement, the parties shall promptly hold consultations on the problem, it being understood that the other party shall have the rights to cease further cooperation under this agreement." President Bush gave them good reason to invoke Article 7. However, the PRC itself may have violated a related international agreement, the Missile Technology Control Regime, by transferring missile technology to Pakistan. Beijing has repeatedly equated its exports to Pakistan to the American sale in 1992 of F-16 military jets to Taiwan. However, it has taken three years for the PRC to act. The PRC is now selling weapons grade uranium and technology, including missile technology to Iran and Pakistan. Essentially, Bush left President Clinton to deal with an issue he had used for political purposes during the 1992 presidential campaign. Bush tried to save Texas jobs at a time when job security at the manufacturer's plant was a crucial political consideration. Job security is still a crucial consideration. However, the Clinton Administration seems reluctant to impose sanctions on China as it is required by law to do on a showing of China's violation of the agreement. Imposition of sanctions would force the White House to cut off billions of dollars of trade with China. That country is not an ideal trading partner. It


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is the world's worst thief of intellectual property (software and compact disks), and it has become a major dumper. China sells goods here at artificially low prices aimed at driving American competitors out of business. In 1990, President Bush signed a law requiring the United States to halt export permits and to impose a ban on many imports from countries that engage in the transfer of missile technology. The imposition of sanctions would have domestic political and economic consequences. Failure to impose them would also have consequences; the security of the United States might be endangered with nuclear missiles in the hands of rogue states, like Iraq. The president might have to dispatch American troops to some remote country attacked by another in a collision of interests that threatens to spill over into other neighboring nations, eg., Yugoslavia. At one time, Yugoslavia was a collection of republics with Tito, also known as Josip Broz, ruling this unruly collection of ethnic groups. Tito died in 1989, and matters went from bad to worse. A collision of religious and ethnic groups became inevitable In 1991, all this ended with secession of the republics beginning with Slavonia and followed by Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina Montenegro, and Macedonia. Serbia was left, and its dream of a Greater Serbia ruled from Belgrade seemed over. But Slobodan Milocevic, president of Serbia had other ideas. He armed the Serbian irregular army which promptly seized large portions of Croatia, shelling open cities in the process, from Dubrovnik to Sarajevo in Bosnia with a heavily Muslim population. The Serbian irregular forces presided over murder, torture, and sundry other crimes, all labeled by them as "ethnic cleansing" which shocked the world. The European Community dithered, with France and England declining to commit troops except to protect humanitarian deliveries of food and medicine. These soldiers wore the blue berets of the United Nations. However, the United Nations also imposed an embargo on any arms destined for the army defending Bosnia and Herzegovina. This embargo was probably in violation of Article 51 of the UN Charter. Article 51 preserved to UN member states the inherent right of self-defense against an armed attack. Under both presidents Bush and Clinton, the United States also vacillated. Neither was willing to commit American troops to defend the so-called safe havens, cities and large towns where food and medical supplies could be delivered by airlift. By mid-August of 1995, Serb forces in both Croatia and Bosnia Herzegovina may have extended themselves too far. Croatia's president Franjo Tudgman decided to make his move to recover territory lost to Serbia in the Krajina region. Croatian troops did recover this region and continued their drive to push the Serbia forces further south and out of artillery range of Dubrovnik. The Croats


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wanted to encourage tourism to this walled city on the Croatian sea coast, where Tito once owned a summer home. Were President Clinton to commit troops to defend the UN peacekeeping forces in the event their withdrawal became necessary, two constitutional provisions would apply. One appears in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11. "The Congress shall have the power.... to declare war." Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution makes "The President [shall be].... Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States...." The United States ratified the United Nations Treaty in 1945, and Congress enacted the United Nations Participation Act in the same year. Additionally, the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) was created in 1947 and the treaty was ratified by the Senate. Its original objective was to defend Germany against an armed attack by the Soviet Union. The likelihood of such an attack has all but disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-90. So the military elements of NATO have been looking, so far without success, for an alternative mission. Some thought the war in Yugoslavia might offer a reason for NATO to intervene there. On two occasions, NATO did intervene by sending its aircraft to bomb the Serbian irregulars, much to the chagrin of the UN's civilian adviser who was given a veto power over the use of NATO airpower. For his part, President Clinton has opposed lifting the arms embargo to permit the Bosnian Muslims to defend themselves against the Serbs. He argues that sending arms to Bosnia would "Americanize" an already complex situation, and both France and Great Britain would withdraw if the embargo were lifted. Withdrawal would be complicated, and forces already there would need protection to withdraw. However, in the closing days of 1995, the principals in the war worked out an agreement in Dayton, Ohio to settle this long-standing ethnic war. NATO forces, including 20,000 American troops, arrived in Bosnia to maintain peace while the substance of the Dayton Agreement was worked out on the ground. Congress reluctantly consented to this use of American troops. All this complexity suggests that President Bush had an opportunity to reduce the level of conflict in 1991 but lost it by indecision. He may have been too preoccupied by the war in the Persian Gulf where actual fighting was over in February, 1991. However, Iraq's war against the Kurds continued using weapons shipped to Baghdad from the United States. Before Saddam Hussein marched into Kuwait, American weapons manufacturers asked for and obtained permits from the Bush Department of Commerce. These permits allowed the arms manufacturers to ship arms to Iraq at a time when it was being attacked by Iran in a war that ended in 1988 with no real winner.


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The war in the Persian Gulf was noteworthy for another reason. President Bush used his presidential platform to proclaim a "New World Order" dedicated to peace, security and the rule of law. However, President Bush at that time was the only head of state to stand condemned by the International Court of Justice for the "unlawful use of force" in Nicaragua. The opinion of the International Court of Justice appears at 25 International Legal Materials 1023 (1986). The court found that the United States -- Bush was Vice President -- was in violation of the United Nations Charter for, among other things, mining Nicaragua's harbor, violating its airspace, arming and financing the contras as an armed force operating against the sovereignty of Nicaragua and as an agent of the United States and bombing oil storage depots within Nicaragua. Reagan described the contras as "freedom fighters," whereas they were former members of the National Guard used by Somoza, a displaced dictator. Bush also opened the post-Cold War era in December, 1989 by invading Panama. The UN General Assembly denounced the invasion of Panama as "a flagrant violation of international law and of the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of states." The United States installed a puppet régime in Panama of bankers, businessmen and "narcotraffickers," effectively denying its population any semblance of democracy with an occupying force of American troops. In 1989, these troops managed to capture General Manual Noriega. He was sent to Miami, indicted for drug-related crimes, tried, convicted and imprisoned in the United States. Whether the bill for at least $2 billion for damages during the invasion of Panama has ever been paid by the United States appears nowhere in accounts of this invasion. In another part of the world, Asia, there are two Chinas. One is the People's Republic of China or mainland China. It does not recognize Taiwan as a separate entity. In fact, Chinese leaders in Beijing consider Taiwan to be a breakaway province of China, and they expect unification of the two at some future time. In 1950, Tibet, conquered by the PRC, became an autonomous province, not the independent nation it once was. Reminding Chinese leaders of China's occupation of Tibet since 1950 and its genocidal slaughter of Tibetans has so far produced no movement toward human rights. In the mid-1990s, trade with China had expanded enormously only to run into the question of prison and slave labor in unsafe conditions. More than 11,000 Chinese workers died in industrial accidents during the first eight months of 1992, more than double the 1991 rate. Chinese officials claim the accidents occurred because of the abysmal working conditions, combined with long hours, inadequate pay and even some physical beatings. This combination produced tensions between workers and their [sometimes] American joint venture bosses.


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Chinese workers had great difficulty in grasping a simple fact. Foreign capital was not invested in China to improve living and working conditions for the workers; it was invested in plant and equipment to capitalize on the benefits of cheap Chinese labor. Most of corporate America is quite indifferent to violations of human rights in China; observance of these niceties of international conduct would interfere with the development of sound business relations that enabled everyone involved to profit from exploitation of Chinese labor. Exploitation of cheap labor is not the only benefit enjoyed by American companies that have invested about $3 billion in plants in China. Because the same companies may manufacture components for their own goods or sell them to others in the United States, a net loss of American jobs occurs. Furthermore, the United States buys about 40 percent of China's exports, and the dollars earned by China helps finance industrial, military, and infrastructure modernization. The Three Gorges Dam, for example, planned and under construction, will harness the hydroelectric power of the Yangtse River. This project will also displace 1.5 million inhabitants of the area to be flooded on completion. Many observers of this project see it as an unbelievably destructive environmental disaster. In fact, the Export Import Bank in Washington has declined to support or finance its construction on environmental grounds. There are likely to be political consequences during construction and upon completion. China need to feed its teeming millions, and removing so much land from use in agriculture may compel the Chinese rulers to buy food abroad. In early 1996, its government agency bought 2 million metric tons of wheat from America. American business concerns are eager to import goods manufactured by cheap Chines labor. They are pouring money into Chinese special economic zones to build plants where workers are paid less than a living wage to turn out everything from toys to clothing for export to the United States. China also looks to Boeing for commercial jets in the passenger trade. Beijing however, extorts know-how and high-skill jobs from Boeing and other manufacturers of technology. As a condition of sales, Beijing forces these companies to manufacture parts of their products within China and to execute technology transfer agreements of great importance to local industry. Eventually, Boeing and other companies with plants in China are expected to replace American concerns with companies run from Beijing. Chinese leaders are planning for self-sufficiency at just about every level. With the exception of self-sufficiency, the same trend exists in Mexico under the umbrella of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It was approved by Congress in 1994 over the opposition of union labor. Labor officials predicted that the provisions of NAFTA


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would allow the export of American jobs to Mexico. Its workers are often paid less than $1 an hour for a fifty-hour work week. The beneficiaries of these low wages and unsafe working conditions are often American fashion boutiques. The print media ran stories critical of those American retail outlets that sold goods made cheaply in Mexico. In addition, the mass media showed a few television documentaries filmed to show the poverty exploited by American companies. There is nothing new about exploitation of its workers by corporate America. They are merely repeating the same pattern in China. These companies have no interest in improving the lot of Chinese workers. Building plants in China is only an investment, and the products, made by underpaid workers, will be exported to and sold within the United States. Even television documentaries showing the wretched working conditions of workers are unlikely to end this profitable business. The new, but almost uniformly conservative international economists offer historians a rationale for the cultural differences that held up domestic development in favor of furthering foreign relations often based on suspicion. China is still a developing nation that will need huge amounts of capital to expand its trade with the west. Together with building infrastructure, the Chinese must either grow enough food to feed the teeming millions along the coast and inland, or buy wheat, for example, on the international market. The overseas Chinese supply a great deal of the capital for infrastructure construction, such as the unbelievably destructive Three Gorges Dam planned for the Yangtse River. For the sake of hydroelectric power, the managers of this enterprise have created an environmental disaster. An estimated 1.5 million people will be displaced by construction of the dam. It will create a huge inland sea large enough to require relocation of Chinese living in homes to be flooded. The Chinese military occupation of Tibet in 1950 followed Mao's rise to power by only one year. Since then, Chinese leaders have moved slowly to eliminate Tibetan culture by genocidal murder of Tibetans only intermittently noted by the American press. The leaders in Beijing are guilty of the most heinous record of human rights, violating them constantly. American television captured scenes of military violence most recently in 1989 with the arrest and imprisonment of thousands of students during the Tiananmen Square disturbances. In 1995, the arrest and imprisonment of Wei Jiang for threatening to overthrow the government with his words was widely reported in the Western press. American business, eager to import goods manufactured with cheap Chinese labor, are competing with European business free of any guilt over human rights. They are pouring money into Chinese special economic zones to build plants where local workers are paid less than a


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living wage to turn out everything from toys to clothing for export to the United States. Yet China has not joined the World Trade Organization, principally because of its failure to act like a decent international citizen by threatening Taiwan with warlike conduct. There is nothing new about all this. The same trend is occurring under the umbrella of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This agreement was approved by Congress in 1994. Union labor opposed NAFTA, predicting it would "export" American jobs to Mexico. Mexican workers are often paid less than $1 an hour for a fifty-hour work week. For the most part, the beneficiaries have been retail boutiques offering clothing to the American market. Mexican workers are paid less than $1 per hour for a fifty hour work week, so American labor has been unable to compete in certain markets. Film documentaries have been produced showing the exploitation of Mexican labor. To entertain and inform all those people with or without jobs because they were "exported," The Walt Disney Company acquired Capital Cities/ABC in 1996. The acquisition was valued at $19 billion. This combination will offer merchandise, theme parks, sound track albums, and books. Westinghouse Electric Corporation acquired control of CBS for $5.4 billion, Time Warner Inc. acquired Turner Broadcasting Company for $7.5 billion. After regulatory approval, Time Warner was the world's largest media-entertainment combine. NBC, not wishing to be upstaged, was also acquired by corporate behemoth,General Electric Company. Fox Television, owned by Rupert Murdoch, announced a 24-hour all-news service competing with CNN. So did CBS and NBC. However, without adequate control of content by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), these networks, satisfied to deliver news alone are not expected to deliver educational television for the benefit of children. Diversity in programming will be sacrificed to the bottomline mentality. Paramount Communications and Viacom, Inc. joined forces in 1994, and the various subsidiaries like Simon & Schuster are being digested. Paramount Pictures is a subsidiary of Viacom, Inc. and Paramount designed a "home page" on Internet. In 1995, it allowed a user to download a movie trailer and preview its content, the Paramount film itself. Disney and Universal both had "home pages" on the Internet, and the latter invited users to lift off with Apollo 13 -- http://www.mca.com. In 1996, Congress rewrote the laws governing communications by television, cable, and radio. Telephone companies like American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), MCI will continue to compete but in a new market. The Baby Bells spun off in 1982 as the result of an antitrust consent decree and forbidden to enter the long distance market, were permitted to compete for entry into the cable and television business using their own phone lines. By 1997, most of these companies will have been converted


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to fiber optic lines carrying huge amounts of data into homes or offices. Wireless technology offers still another technology for rapid communication, and modems were built to accelerate the speed of communications. ISDN could handle over 120,000 bytes per second, and still faster transmission will be available by 1997. These very high speeds are essential now to accommodate the growing size of the Internet. On June 11, 1996 a three-judge federal court in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania found the Communications Decency Act violated certain free speech guarantees of the First Amendment. American Civil Liberties Union v. Janet Reno, Attorney General of the United States, et al (E.D. Pa. 1996). The court also made findings of fact. "Today, over 9,400,000 host computers of which 60 percent are located in the United States....In all, reasonable estimates are that as many as 40 million people around the world can and do access the....Internet. That figure is expected to grow to 200 million Internet users by the year 1999." However, the real story of 1996 was the struggle between Speaker Newt Gingrich and the Clinton White House, the outcome of which would determine who occupied it for the last four years of the 20th Century. Republican intransigence ultimately shut down the federal government on three occasions. The Constitution stipulates that Congress must enact a bill raising the debt ceiling, which at the end of 1995, was $4.9 trillion. The Congress could shut down the government by refusing to enact such a measure. It did so on December 15, 1995, principally because Gingrich could not control the firebrands of his own party. These seventy-three Republican freshmen wanted a balanced budget by 2002 together with a tax cut of at least $320 billion spread out over seven years. Clinton refused to budge, unless Congress met his concerns about Medicare, education, and the environment. With the government shut down at midnight on December 14, 1995 here's what Daniel Schorr, a news analyst for National Public Radio said on December 20 as federal employees faced a bleak Christmas: Daniel Schorr: If and when a squabble over stop-gap spending authority is resolved it will be Dayton time in the battle of the budget. That is to say that the adversaries, having civilian population, the leaders on both sides see nothing to be gained from prolonging the conflict and are ready to seek a combatweary settlement. Like Dayton [Ohio], the Clinton-Dole-Gingrich understanding on the budget starts as an agreement on a negotiating process, and then comes the hard part. That involves coming out of dug-in positions with no [Under-Secretary of State] Holbroke or [Secretary of State] Christopher to knock heads together. President Clinton says there are policy differences on 80 to 90 issues, but the central issue is on whose back does the burden mainly fall for achieving a budget theoretically balanced over seven years. And at the core of that question is the question of cuts in the growth of health care programs, Medicare and


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Medicaid, versus cuts in come taxes. The president's most entrenched position is that he will protect the health programs from the deep cuts that the Republicans want, but it is almost impossible to do that and and cut taxes by $240 billion without virtually gutting most other and domestic programs, which mainly serve the middle class and the poor. Mr. Clinton has dug another hole for himself by saying he also favors a tax cut, but only by $98 billion, but opening the way to being obliged to bargain on a compromise figure. You may have noticed that the so-called Blue Dogs, the group of some 20 conservative Democrats, who officially call themselves The Coalition, have come up with a plan proposing compromise figures on Medicare and Medicaid and no tax cuts. The Coalition and some other Democrats have tried to get the administration to drop its tax cut proposal. One of its leaders, Gary Condit of California says: 'We are not against tax cuts, but a tax cut at this time is not in the best interest of setting the priorities for balancing the budget.' The administration has so far been unwilling to reverse itself on cutting taxes. Mr. Clinton may by now be sorry he ever proposed it, but was described as being fearful of being perceived as engaging in another of his famous flip flops. Sometimes it takes courage to flip flop. The arithmetic is pretty stern. To get a balance budget will require relinquishing some firmly-held positions. Maybe it can be done with the grace of Ronald Reagan who signed a tax increase saying: 'The sound you hear is the sound of concrete cracking around my feet.'

With the passage of time since the complete shutdown of the government on December 15, 1995 it became clearer that the obstacle to progress was the House of Representatives. There, Speaker Gingrich was the leader of the seventy-three freshman members elected in 1994. These were the Republican firebrands of the right who would not budge until they get a balanced budget by 2002. They inflicted a lot of damage on each other and the Republican Party. These ideologues failed to predict how President Clinton might react to a threat of default by the United States. He made it plain to the ideologues, but they didn't believe him. The failure was a major political miscalculation by the Republican leadership in the House. Gingrich had become deeply unpopular because of his intemperate positions emphasizing ideology, instead of a pragmatic judgment that something would work. No welfare reform seemed likely during 1996 for this reason. Reform would not happen without the recognition that about 65 percent of its beneficiaries were children unable to work. On at least one subject, both the House and Senate were in overwhelming agreement. On February 1, 1996 Congress passed and sent to the president the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The bill passed by lopsided majorities in both the Senate and the House. This complex measure has changed the ways in which America communicates, via television, cable, telephone, or computers via the Internet. President


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Clinton signed this measure, deregulating the communications world for the first time since the Communications Act of 1934. This new enactment had a built-in clause providing for a judicial review of the section dealing with material thought to be patently offensive, ie., pornography. The plaintiffs opposing this limitation as a violation of the First Amendment guarantee of free speech, particularly where new technology was involved, won in the first round, so now it's on its way to the Supreme Court. In the early months of 1996, primary elections around the country began with New Hampshire and eight candidates and ended with California and one candidate of each party, Senator Bob Dole and Bill Clinton. The seven other Republican candidates dropped by the wayside. Only Pat Buchanan held on, telling the press he would be a factor at the Republican Convention in August. Then, on March 27, 1996 the Supreme Court of the United States came out with a 5-4 opinion in Seminole Tribe v. Florida, 1996 U.S.Lexis 2104 and gave conservative Republican theorists an unexpected boost. In this landmark case, the Court held that a state may not be sued in federal court for asserting failure to negotiate in good faith as required by the Indian Regulatory Gaming Act of 1988. The Eleventh Amendment to the Constitution gave states sovereign immunity to such suits. A blistering dissent was filed by Justices Souter, Stevens, Ginsberg, and Breyer. By applying the principles of this case to block grants of federal funds to states for welfare money, food stamps, and other programs, states cannot be held accountable in federal court for the way in which federal funds are directed by state agencies with block grants. Nor can states be held accountable in courts of their own state for misuse of federal funds. A state sued for not paying welfare beneficiaries may be removed to federal court under 28 U.S.C. 1441 where it may be dismissed on grounds of sovereign immunity under the Eleventh Amendment. Block grants have had mixed reviews in the past, possibly because there is no present framework within which they might be seen. No measure passed by the 104th Congress as of April, 1996 provides that framework. However, they are very roughly comparable to the Community Action Program administered by the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) established by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. The entire program was part of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. In 1981, however, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act created a new statutory formula for the automatic allocation of Community Action Block Grant funds to the states. This formula applied to employed, welfare recipients and children in families living below the poverty level. A problem with this and any formula is that it does not account for national budget reductions during any of the administrations since 1964 when the program originated. And, unless each state generated


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enough money to compensate for the reduced level of national funding reallocated in diminishing amounts, the entire program was delivered a declining level of service to those who most needed it. The bankruptcy of the Social Security System by the year 2020 should be in the forefront of all political calculations today in 1996. Instead, it will continue as the third rail of politics. No politician will touch something treated as a contract. They're in a state of denial. The Baby Boomers -- those born in 1945 or later -- will be coming up for retirement in 2010 at age 65. There won't be any monthly check for these retirees, unless they have set aside savings in some sort of retirement plan.

Combined, what is now North America, South and Central America, Canada and Alaska covers an area of about 16,000,000 square miles, a quarter of the earth's land mass and an area four times that of Europe. Geologists all agree that this land mass was once linked to Asia by a land bridge, now under water. This bridge allowed overland travel between Russia and Alaska. Some forty thousand years before Christopher Columbus ever landed in this new world, it had cultures distinctive to the areas in which each flourished, such as Central America, South America and North America. In 1492, the population of this land mass between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans was variously estimated at between 65 and 150 million people. The natives of the land now submerged by melt from the Ice Age naturally followed climate-dictated changes from the extreme cold of Alaska to the more temperate zones of Central and South America. Glaciation occurred in what is now China and Russia. It may have created a climate so disagreeable that humans were compelled to leave via the land bridge connecting Asia with North America. The end of the Ice Age in North America, during which a huge sheet of ice about two miles thick covered the land as far south as Illinois and Wisconsin has been estimated as occurring about 8000 years ago. As these glaciers in the Ice Age melted, they raised the world's water level by many feet over time. The sheer weight of ice also depressed land levels by as much as 200 feet. For those believing that an even earlier civilization once existed long before the Ice Age, Graham Hancock offers some evidence in Fingerprints of the Gods published by Crown Books in 1995. This essentially unsupported theory relies on movement of the lithosphere, the Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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crust and upper mantle of the earth. Hancock advances the notion that Antarctica was once located in a temperate zone capable of supporting an advanced civilization until some unknown catastrophe moved this area of the planet further south by crustal movement. It is now no more than a rapidly growing ice cap and portends another catastrophe by the year 2013, according to speculation from a few pessimists. A map showing the land mass of Antarctica as it was over 15,000 years ago was found in 1513, long before anything at all was known about Antarctica, and its lines of latitude and longitude were remarkably accurate. A cartographer would need a sophisticated knowledge of spherical trigonometry to use these lines. In 1958, the International Geophysical Year, the land mass of Antarctica was measured and conformed in every respect with the map of 1513. Hancock combines this fact with myths of the ancients and the calculus of equinoctial precession -- the slow, conical motion of the earth's axis of rotation, caused by the gravitational attraction of the sun and moon, and, to a smaller extent, of the planets, on the equatorial bulge of the earth -- to predict a catastrophe by 2013. Hancock's evidence, while interesting for its use of astronomy as its underpinnings, deserves primary attention for its discussion of the remains of the pre-Columbian era. Traces of areas inhabited by people compelled to migrate by a hostile climate and geological changes have been found by archaeologists all along the Pacific Coast of North, Central and South America. In America itself, several distinctive cultures existed at least 3000 years ago in the Middle Atlantic region. As many as 500 Adena culture living sites have been uncovered by modern archaeologists. They have determined that these early sedentary people lived in towns with houses circular in design because of their presumed use for religious ceremonial purposes. The Hopewell culture occurred about the same time as the Adena culture. The Hopewell people also lived in permanent communities deriving their support from extensive agriculture and trade with both Florida, Michigan, and Wyoming. From different nations of indigenous natives, they acquired copper, gold, and other raw materials which their artisans worked into jewelry and other more practical objects. Trade, however, was not all that simple except for commerce using the rivers and boats. The horse, together with huge animals like the mastodon were extinct, until the Spanish brought their own breeds in the sixteenth Century. Some marine archaeologists suggest an interesting possibility. Once there were boat people who travelled by sea from the Mediterranean area to the land mass to their west. Traces of their presence have been found in South America. Writings cut in obsidian and rock surfaces in the American land mass have been found and translated from Phoenician and Hebrew. A few scholars equate ancient Cretan linguistics with those used by the Mayans, suggesting a common origin. On Easter Island in the Pacific, wooden tablets beneath the huge stones were inscribed with


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symbols very much like the script used by the Indus Valley civilization. Some of these findings have been dismissed as forgeries, but most scholars disagree. Other evidence of common origin is quite persuasive in areas of knowledge like mathematics, time measurement, and astronomy. Stonehenge in Great Britain was erected about 5000 years ago. Its builders had a knowledge of mathematics and astronomy of considerable sophistication. They were essentially calendar clocks used to determine date and time. The construction of Stonehenge was in some way governed by astronomy. Its builders used the stones to take sightings on the sun, moon and stars, an exercise that required sophistacated surveying equipment. Mayan architecture discovered in Mexico and urban planning invites comparison with Stonehenge. So precise were the Mayan calendar measurements and observations of astronomy that the Mayans planned and built their cities in such a way that the street pattern lined up exactly with specific celestial movements. All this suggests that Mayans had the same, or even more sophisticated knowledge of mathematics and astronomy as the Druids of Stonehenge. Since it is unlikely that this knowledge arose independently in both places, it is believed that artisans got to the new world by sea from various parts of Europe, Mesopotania and Egypt long before the birth of Christ. There was trade in raw materials, and it makes sense to send artisans for dissemination of knowledge. Historians have barely begun to recognize or understand the rich cultural intricacies of pre-Columbian America, including Aztec, Inca and Ameridian cultures. In 1987, for example, a huge basalt stone was uncovered in Mexico. It showed some 500 hieroglyphs in Mayan script, which still has not been translated. For a far more detailed discussion of archaeology and the history of pre-Columbian civilization, the book by Jim Bailey, Sailing to Paradise: The Discovery of the Americas by 7000 B.C. is recommended. Bailey is an Oxford graduate and a former RAF pilot during World War II. It was published in 1994 by Simon & Schuster. What Bailey suggests is that the new world of what is now North America alone had a civilization more primitive then -- 1492 -- than Central and parts of South America. In North America, Indian tribes were unbelievably numerous and used some 2000 different languages to communicate, a clearly impossible task for those artisans who normally followed commerce with their knowledge. Another factor needs to be considered. The climate of North America was inhospitable due to the Ice Age which seemingly did not seem to have affected more temperate zones like Central America and Peru. The land bridge apparently used by Asians and Mongols to cross over to what is now Alaska was probably buried by water at the end of the Ice Age about 6800 B.C. With the melt from glaciers, the water level rose by almost 200


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feet. Accordingly, those migrating from Asia to America later had to use boats; the land bridge was beneath the Bering Sea. There is some possibility that the Ice Age may have interrupted the flow of migrants from Asia. If so, it may be one of the reasons later arrivals from either Asia or Europe may have found a civilization less advanced than that of the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas. Travel by sea from Western Europe seems to have reached Central and South America before there was much trade with North America, except for copper. This metal in its pure form was essential during the Bronze Age, partly for weapons where copper combined with tin to create bronze. Pure copper was sent from northern Michigan to Europe for smelting. Some of it remained where it was found. Before smelting, copper had to be hammered into shape by hand, and the copper miners left hundreds of tiny stone hammers used by indigenous natives to make useful objects like bowls. While the Vikings are known to have visited North America by the year 1000 and even established some settlements, they brought very little with them in the way of knowledge leading to a higher civilization like that of the Toltecs that predated the Aztecs. The first half of the fifteenth Century in Europe saw the beginnings of the Renaissance and Gutenburg's invention of printing using movable type. However, nations in Europe were almost constantly at war among themselves.When not at war, those who lived in a French or Spanish countryside were in perpetual danger of starvation. If they migrated to the cities in search of food, they often so crowded the cities that disease spread like wildfire. Waste management did not exist, so human waste simply lay in the streets or flowed into the river. In Spain, the Inquisition replaced war as an instrument of violence and death. Heresy had to be punished and the truth often could not surface without the cruelest torture. Some 20,000 Jews were put to death by the Inqusition and its torturers. King Ferdinand presided over and had authorized this murderous monstrosity, but Torquemada was the king's agent for carrying out Ferdinand's orders. But Queen Isabella found time to listen to a story from Christopher Columbus. He did not say the world was flat as so many childrens' textbooks erroneously claim. What Columbus did say was that the royal couple needed gold to finance the wars of the Spanish monarchy, and he would find it in the Indies by sailing to the west. European states, and Spain was no exception, had exhausted their coffers with wars and needed a certain source of gold. So, in August, 1492 Columbus set sail and arrived in the new world 32 days later. He or his crew first saw land in the Bahamas, where the three vessels in the squadron from Spain dropped anchor to be greeted by the Arawaks,


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indigenous natives of the new world. The Arawaks lived in village communes with well-developed agriculture, including the cultivation of corn, yams and other fruit. They could spin and weave, but they had no work animals or horses. The Arawaks also wore small gold rings in their ears. This fact was to have tragic consequences. While Columbus willingly accepted food from the Arawaks, he took some natives by force to find out where the gold came from. Still in search of an answer to this question, Columbus sailed on to what is now Cuba and then Hispaniola, the island that today is Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Before returning to Spain, Columbus built a fort and left some men behind to find the gold. He also took about 500 Arawaks on board as slaves to be sold in Spain. Only 200 survived the voyage, and the rest died in Spain after being sold as slaves. On return, letters about Columbus suggested he was treated in extravagant fashion befitting an intrepid sailor throughout much of Europe. However, most of the time he did not know where he was in the Caribbean Sea. On his second voyage a year later, Columbus had seventeen ships with many soldiers and trained dogs to track Indians and, if necessary, kill them. His objectives were gold and slaves. When the Indians were unable to deliver gold, they were either put to death by the Spanish soldiers or put in chains for the trip back to Europe as slaves. In two years, about half the Indians in Hispaniola had died either from disease imported by the Spanish crew or were killed outright, the beginnings of genocide. Most of this information and perhaps the only source on many matters was Bartolomé de las Casas, a young priest present during the conquest of Cuba, who later became an outspoken critic of Spanish cruelty. What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas, Spanish explorers later did to the Aztecs, the Mayans, the Incas of Peru, and the settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts did to the Indians of the Powhatan and Pequot tribes. Hernando Cortés arrived in Mexico in search of gold. Like Columbus, Cortés had a chronicler in his entourage, Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Much of what we know may be found in the letters Bernal Díaz wrote describing the march of death led by Cortés. He and his soldiers killed the Aztecs almost randomly, but with a purpose. He was determined to paralyze the will of the people by a sudden, frightful deed. The deed occurred at Tenochtitlán, a beautiful city where Montezuma ruled the Aztecs. Cortés was greeted in friendship by Montezuma who may have thought this bearded man arriving in a strange vessel was the legendary Quetzalcoatl who had promised to return. Cortés and his soldiers were invited to attend a festive event, the feast of the god Huitzilopochtli. In a crowded hall where dancing was underway, Spanish soldiers turned on the unarmed guests and killed most of them before being driven out by


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superior numbers of Aztecs. However, the Spanish soldiers left an invisible killer behind, the smallpox bacillus. Over a period of two months, Aztecs died by the thousands, while Cortés returned with soldiers and laid siege to the once white brilliant city and its dwindling population of diseased and starving people. Cortés had built ships using them to cut off food supplies to this island. Then he destroyed the great aqueduct that brought fresh water to the city. According to David Stannard, author of the American Holocaust, the soldiers of Cortés " burned magnificent public buildings and marketplaces, and the aviaries with their thousands of wondrous birds; they gutted and laid waste parks and gardens and handsome boulevards. The metropolis that the Spanish had just months earlier described as the most beautiful city on earth, so dazzling and beguiling in its exotic and brilliant variety, became a monotonous pile of rubble, a place of dust, flame, and death." Apologists for this auto da fé at Tenochtitlán accused the Aztecs of ritual human sacrifices of about 20,000 defeated warriors a year. However, in just a few weeks, Cortés and his soldiers had killed about 350,000, including innocent women, children and the elderly, murdering them in a brutal manner, after first starving them and infecting the Aztecs with smallpox. Genocide again. Other conquistadores from Spain gave the same bloody treatment to almost all of Central America for El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaraugra, and Guatemala to Costa Rica and Panama, leaving behind them a legacy of cruelty that lingers invisibly today. They were described as Indians, only because Cortez thought he'd found the Indies. All too often, people are saddled with the names of their conquerors. The Pilgrims, for example, left England to avoid further religious persecution and some of the other practices later proscribed by the Constitution in a country named after a Portugese explorer, Americus Vespucius.The early settlers in New England and Virginia knew nothing about growing their own food, so they should have been grateful for the presence of Indians. Instead, the settlers followed the same cruel example of the Spanish. In 1585, for example, Richard Grenville landed in Jamestown, Virginia with seven ships. The Indians greeted the new arrivals with great warmth and provided food. However, when one of them stole a small silver cup, Grenville sacked and burned the whole Indian village, including fields of corn surrounding it. In the sixteenth Century, explorers, whether Spanish or French and later English settlers all found Indians generally peaceful and generous. The Indians from Florida to Massachusetts had a distinct culture of their own and ways of governance unfamiliar to the new arrivals. Howard Zinn in his book, A People's History of the United States described the Iroquois, saying that "land was owned in common and worked in common. Hunting


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was done together and the catch was divided among the members of the village. The concept of private ownership of land was foreign to the Iroquois. Women were important and respected in Iroquois society, ...and families were grouped in clans and a dozen or more clans made up a village. The senior women in the village named the men who represented the clans at village and tribal councils. They also named the forty-nine chiefs who were the ruling council for the Five-Nation confederacy of the Iroquois....Children in Iroquois society, while taught the cultural heritage of their people and solidarity with the tribe were also taught to be independent, not to submit to overbearing authority." All of this was totally alien to Europeans, who controlled the family through the father. He in turn was answerable in religious matters to a priest. Women were subservient in all matters. Thus, at the very outset, a clash of cultures was inevitable, and the foreigners won in most cases because of superior weapons. Furthermore, the Europeans were determined to take the land considering themselves as blessed by the Lord in secular matters like seizure of lands. No real effort was made to deal with Indians as equals; they were potential slaves for export in the 16th Century. In Guatemala, American cruelty has been reported only intermittently by the national press. In El Salvador, the right wing military of today has conducted a campaign against its opposition just as vicious as anything Columbus and later Spanish marauders did in the sixteenth Century. Pedro de Alvarado, one of the leaders of the slaughter in Tenochtitlán even encouraged Las Casas to write letters describing his genocidal exploits. They appear in a book about this, An Account of the Conquest of Guatemala in 1524 edited by S.J. Mackie and published in 1972 by Milford House. What Las Casas wrote was: By other massacres and murders besides the above, they have destroyed and devastated a kingdom more than a hundred leagues square, one of the happiest in the way of fertility and population in the world. This same tyrant (de Alvarado) wrote that it was more populous than the kingdom of Mexico; and he told the truth. He and his brothers, together with the others, have killed more than four or five million people in fifteen or sixteen years, from the year 1525 until 1540, and they continue to kill and destroy those who are still left; and so they will kill the remainder.

De Alvarado was not alone in this genocidal enterprise. He was followed by others equally cruel. And as elsewhere, disease, enslavement, and outright murder combined to extinguish entire Indian cultures throughout Central America. While Spain had a brief period of Empire, all the gold and silver stolen and shipped back to Spain made only its kings richer. They had more money to hire mercenaries to fight their wars, all


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but a few of them lost. All that remained in Spain was inflation, and starvation, with the rich richer and the poor poorer. And so it remained until the 1930s, when King Alphonzo XIII was forced to leave his country. Fascist Francisco Franco took over, but not without fierce resistance from Spanish Republicans and American volunteers. The Spanish Civil War was a testing ground for Hitler's weapons. They were used by the soldiers of General Franco in a prelude to World War II in which Spain compromised its neutrality. When Columbus visited America in 1492, he described its inhabitants asIndians for the same reason as the other early explorers. They all thought they had found the Indies. However, the Europeans brought with them the invisible bacillus of deadly diseases like bubonic plague, smallpox, measles and many other diseases for which the Indians had neither cure nor immunity. Those not killed by settlers or diseases, or exported as slaves were fortunate to have survived at all. There was never any doubt that the Europeans believed the Indians had to be exterminated. They acted as barriers to an expanding population that needed food. The European settlers were generally incompetent to grow food, and they clearly resented Indian agricultural superiority. The settlers were also shortsighted. To punish the Indians for some imagined misdeed, the settlers simply burned the Indian's corn in the fields or in storage, instead of using it for their own consumption. English settlers even punished their own by executing those who sought food and comfort by living with the Indians who offered both. This genocidal slaughter continued in Virginia and all of New England for over a century. By the end of King Phillip's War in 1676, the Indian population had been reduced by almost 90 percent in both areas. The Europeans indiscriminately killed women and children in these wars, a policy that was flatly and intentionally genocidal. No population could survive if its women and children were destroyed, and America's settlers carried out the destruction of the Indian culture. In 1834, Alexis de Tocqueville, a shrewd observer of the American scene described the aftermath in his book, Democracy in America: In its dealings with the North American Indians, the European tyranny weakened their feelings for their country, dispersed their families, obscured their traditions, and broke their chain of memories; it also changed their customs and increased their desires beyond reason, making them more disorderly and less civilized than they had been before. At the same time, the moral and physical condition of these peoples has constantly deteriorated, and in becoming more wretched, they had also become more barbarous. Nevetheless, the Europeans have not been able to change the character of the Indians entirely, and


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although they did not destroy, they have not been able to establish order or subdue them.

America would always have a problem with the Indians, as settlers expanded to the west. However, a group of thinkers in Boston had an idea that was appealing to the settlers and their leaders. By 1763, the war among the British, the French, and the settlers had come to an end; only the British colonists stood between the settlers and their freedom from the tyranny of British rule. Britain's Proclamation of 1763 declared Indian lands beyond the Appalachians out of bounds for white settlers, a move that infuriated them. Britain, however, had to pay more attention to the colonies as a source of revenue to pay the costs of its wars in Europe. Great Britain seemed almost constantly to be at war with one or more of the continental nations and had to pay its own soldiers, as well as hired mercenaries. Those who left Great Britain to live a different and perhaps better life in the New World had absolutely no interest in liquidating the British monarchy's war debts. Nor did settlers in America have any representative in the British Parliament to argue for the settlers' interests. For King George III, the fact that his monarchy needed revenue from the colonies was enough. Moreover, colonial trade had become increasingly important to Britain's economy. Thus, American leaders saw the future clearly in the 1760s, and it was a future without British colonial rule. For the most part, the American leadership was wealthy, having profited from trade and other business ventures. The division of wealth was terribly unequal in the 1760s as it is in the last days of the twentieth Century. This fact allowed the rich merchant class and its spokesmen, like James Otis and Samuel Adams in Massachusetts and Thomas Jefferson and George Washington in Virginia to act together with a decent respect for the grievances of the poor. They were the victims of imperial misrule. The Privy Council, for example, was central to imperial administration of the colonies. It was a group of royal advisers that from Tudor times (1485-1603) exercised general administrative supervision over the British realm. With respect to the American colonies, the Privy Council was responsible for reviewing colonial legislation and disallowing, in the King's name, such legislation that was inconsistent with the laws of England. Within certain jurisdictional amounts, decisions of colonial courts were subject to appellate review before the Privy Council. Accordingly, the Privy Council was in a position to control colonial initiatives and insure that colonial economic policies were entirely consistent with British priorities. The intellectual energy of the American Revolution originated in New England. John Locke's Second Treatise on Government was published in 1689, at a time the English were rebelling against their government and Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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setting up a parliamentary government, and it had been widely read in America. Locke must have supported slavery. As a political adviser to North Carolina, he had recommended a government of slaveowners ruled by forty wealthy landowners. Both Jefferson and Patrick Henry owned slaves, and universal equality did not wash well with the working class of New England. During the century and a half between the arrival of twenty blacks in Jamestown in 1619 and the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1776, slavery -- nonexistent in England itself -- spread through all the English colonies. It grew like a cancer, at first slowly, then inexorably as colonists desperate for cheap labor and eager for material gain imported hundreds of thousands of Africans to work in their fields, principally those in the South where cotton was king and tobacco was an expensive new vice in Great Britain. Before slavery really expanded in the colonies, many settlers used indentured labor. In return for their passage to America, indentured settlers had to work for a period of years before his contract was paid off and he was freed. By 1694, however, indentured labor declined. So the need for slaves increased. By 1770, slaves were estimated to be 39 percent of the population of the six colonies of the south and 4.4 percent of the population of the seven northern colonies. George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson, all Founding Fathers of the United States owned slaves, but Jefferson could still say that "all people were created equal" in the Declaration of Independence. Otis and Adams used the fiery oratory of liberation to appeal to the masses -- No taxation without Representation -- was only one of many calls to action. The point was to mobilize class energy of the poor for the purpose of advancing the political interests of the rich. This was not really deception; it involved a genuine recognition of legitimate lower-class grievances. Resentment of British colonialism in all its forms from the quartering of British troops, the impressment of Americans to serve on British vessels, unfair taxation and the British use of hired mercenaries to enforce British rule spread from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island to South Carolina, and Georgia, including New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia and North Carolina. Each harsher measure taken by the British escalated colonial resentment to the point of rebellion. In 1774, the colonists set up the Continental Congress, an illegal body, to govern their affairs, and it was a forerunner of the future independent nation about to be proclaimed in 1776. On July 4, 1776 the Declaration of Independence was published in Boston with a reading by Thomas Crafts, a conservative who opposed


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militant action against the British. Its second paragraph was its political statement. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.

The full text downloaded via Internet was prepared by Gerald Murphy and distributed by the National Public Telecomputing Network. It contained a long list of grievances that began by accusing King George III with conspiring to establish an absolute tyranny over the states. The American victory over the British army was made possible by an armed people determined to end British rule, but without a fixed idea of the form of government that would serve the people well. In the new environment the victory had left the people free to design an appropriate form by which they might govern themselves. The Revolution was designed to change the flow of authority -- indeed, the structure of politics as the colonists had known it -- but it was in no way intended to do away with the principle of authority itself. Authority and the way it was exercised had to rest on the consent of the people governed, and a government without essential authority would lead to chaos. Such chaos surfaced during and after the war for independence itself. The Continental Congress had virtually no authority worth mentioning. However, there were draft riots when it became apparent that the rich did not need to enter the militia; they could buy a substitute. Farmers who enlisted were promised land, and Loyalist land was confiscated and then sold to both tenants and others, converting them to freeholders. However, they later discovered they were no longer paying rent, but had to make payments of interest and principal to banks on mortgages taken out to finance the confiscation of the land in the first place. Farmers were particularly militant in 1787. They were threatened with seizure of their newly-acquired land for failure to pay their debts. Their resentment led to Shay's Rebellion in Massachusetts. There the legislature declined to issue paper money so debts might be paid. Daniel Shay led the group demanding reform, and there was some violence. A few of Shay's militia were tried, convicted and hung for treason. Shay himself fled to Vermont and was later pardoned. Even so, the concern of landowners was evident. General Henry Knox, a veteran of Washington's army founded an organization of veterans, the Order of Cincinnati, possibly to resist


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radicalism wherever it might surface. The Order still exists but engages only in annual bouts of nostalgia. Thus, in May of 1787, the founding fathers of the Constitution gathered in Philadelphia to write it against a background of what must be described as class warfare, or at least the resentment of those without property. The objective of the thirty-nine delegates who finally signed -- fifty-five had been designated -- was the construction of a political framework that has survived for over two hundred years. The Constitution was intended to both protect property against unwarranted expropriation and secure the liberty they had been denied under British rule. The Articles of Confederation were a failure. These articles virtually guaranteed that each state would be an independent entity without real status as a nation. George Washington was made president of the Constitutional Convention. His letter of transmittal of the completed Constitution was sent to Congress on December 2, 1789. The Constitution itself was a compromise between slaveholding interests of the South and the moneyed interests of the North. It was also a political compromise. The Congress might send a law to the president who might veto it. However, both houses of the Congress could enact the law by overriding the presidential veto which required a two-thirds vote of both the House and the Senate. Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution required the advice and consent of the Senate for approval of Supreme Court justices and "all other officers of the United States" nominated by the president. The president might negotiate treaties with foreign states, but they had to be ratified by a two-thirds vote of the Senate to apply within the United States. Missouri v. Holland, 252 U.S. 416 (1920). History records that southern planters acquired huge landholdings from the Indians, as we shall see later. These southerners had to bargain for a continuation of slavery, while northerners wanted laws regulating commerce in the huge markets opening up. Both got what they wanted. Another compromise provided that Senators would be elected by the state legislatures, while members of the House were elected by popular vote in each state. It took one hundred and twenty-four years to change this with ratification of the Seventh Amendment in 1913. Politically, this amendment helped break up the party oligarchy in the Senate, since state political bosses found it more difficult to get their candidates elected by popular vote. By June 21, 1788 the requisite nine states had ratified the Constitution, and it went into effect. However, those who supported its ratification had also promised to add a Bill of Rights to protect the citizens against the excesses of the government. Thus, in the first Congress, the first ten amendments were added to the Constitution, and they went into effect in


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November, 1791. Perhaps the most significant of these ten amendments were the First, the Fourth, and the Fifth Amendments. The First Amendment protected freedom of speech and religion, the Fourth Amendment protected the citizens against an unreasonable search and seizure of the person or the property without a warrant based on probable cause, and the Fifth Amendment protected the citizens against a taking of private property for public use without just compensation and no person could be compelled to testify against himself in a criminal proceeding. Article III of the Constitution established the Supreme Court of the United States, and Congress was authorized to create inferior courts. Today, the District Courts in the fifty states have jurisdiction to hear and determine all civil and criminal cases, and an appeal might be taken to one of the twelve United States Courts of Appeals. The Supreme Court may decide to hear an appeal from these appellate courts where a substantial federal question is presented. It may also hear and determine appeals from the highest state court of each state. The Supreme Court also has original jurisdiction of cases brought by one state against another, usually boundary disputes. In a case where a law is alleged to be unconstitutional, a three-judge district court hears the matter, and an appeal may be taken directly to the Supreme Court. In 1798, the Congress enacted its Alien and Sedition Act of that year, and it troubled constitutional scholars who developed a theory of prior restraint of the press if a court restrained publication without first examining the document to be published. However, the Sedition Act made it a crime to write or say anything "false, scandalous, or malicious" against the government, Congress or the president with intent to defame them or excite popular hatreds against them. James Madison was of the opinion that the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 was a violation of the First Amendment. On the very dubious theory that the United States had incorporated the British rule of seditious libel, courts upheld this law which was not found in violation of the First Amendment until over a century later in New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971). This was the Pentagon Papers Case in which the government's wrongdoing was exposed by the press, as it should have been. Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803) was the first case dealing with the court's power to find a law enacted by Congress repugnant to the Constitution, in this case, Section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789. The case established a precedent that has been followed ever since. It held that Congress could not enlarge the court's power beyond that provided in the Constitution itself. Certainly not the first of the early cases heard by the Supreme Court but clearly the most significant was McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316


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(1819). Chief Justice John Marshall wrote for a unanimous court that Congress could create a national bank and that a state could not tax this bank, a federal instrumentality. Thus, the Supreme Court could declare state action unconstitutional. It was in the best interests of the nation that Congress should have the means to exercise the powers delegated to it by Article I of the Constitution, and a national bank was a necessary and proper instrumentality to carry out the nation's fiscal powers. Finally, the court held that a state may not tax those instrumentalities to which its sovereign powers do not extend. The national bank was the result of Alexander Hamilton's drive as President George Washington's Secretary of the Treasury. Congress approved a charter for the bank in 1791. Thomas Jefferson, who would be elected president in 1800, opposed it as an unnecessary extension of federal power. During the presidency of James Madison (1808-1816), a Jeffersonian Congress refused to renew the bank's charter. Following five years of inflation and economic chaos that coincided with the War of 1812, Congress, though still under Jeffersonian control, reversed itself and chartered the Second Bank of the United States. Madison noted that the national bank was constitutional only because Hamilton's bank had never been challenged. He saw the bank as a way of funding the county's war debts. However, when Andrew Jackson became president in 1828, he abolished the bank because it trampled on states' rights. On December 2, 1823 President Monroe expressed his ideas on foreign policy in his seventh message to Congress. Known as the Monroe Doctrine, it served notice on European powers that the United States considered Latin America its sphere of influence. In part, the president said: "We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety." By notes delivered to the ministers in Washington of Great Britain, Spain, Portugal, and Russia, President Monroe made his point firmly, noting the differences in their form of government. The period from 1791 to 1832 was one of chaos and political change. In 1802, for example, Congress enacted and Jefferson signed the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act, a measure that provided there would be no land cession except by treaty with an Indian tribe. Congress thought the measure was essential to protect the rights of Indians whose lands were being expropriated by speculators. Andrew Jackson was one of them. In 1803, Jefferson doubled the then land area of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase of land from France. Andrew Jackson didn't think this was enough, so he persuaded President James Madison that Indian land in Georgia was ripe for the taking. Thus, the War of 1812 was not one fought


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against England for survival, but a war to expand the land of America into Florida inhabited by Indians and a few settlers, some of them Spanish left over from post-Columbian conquests. While the Louisiana Purchase doubled the land mass of the United States, there may be a cloud on title to this land. The French conveyed title to the United States. However, the French did not have title to most of this land. Title to the rest of it resided with the Native Americans, the Indians, resting on ancient possession and other principles. This land needs to be the subject of a quiet title action. In fact, Article VI of the Treaty with France states: Art. VI. The United States promise to execute such treaties and articles as may have been between Spain and the tribes and nations of Indians, until, by mutual consent of the United States and the said tribes or nations, other suitable articles shall have been agreed upon.

Spain ceded to France all the land it ceded to the United States by the Treaty with France. So, the United States acquired all the land covered by the Louisiana Purchase subject to the rights of "the tribes and nations of Indians." The phrase "other suitable articles" in Article VI does not allow the United States to deny its obligations to the Indians. In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson selected his personal secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to lead a voyage up the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains, over the Continental Divide, down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean. His partner was William Clark. The trip they took has been described well in Undaunted Courage by Stephen E. Ambrose, a book published by Simon & Schuster in 1996. Ambrose had read the Biddle version of the Lewis and Clark journals. Having read this collection, Ambrose concluded that the policy to be followed in subsequent trips by fur traders or settlers was to kill the Indians if they didn't get out of the way of the westward expansion of the United States. Jefferson was not the last president to approve genocide. Andrew Jackson became a national hero for his exploits in the War of 1812 and in 1814 when he fought and won the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Jackson's forces fought 1000 Creeks and killed 800 of them with superior firepower and consummate guile. The Cherokees were promised friendship if they helped Jackson, and they did by coming around behind the Creeks and attacking them from the rear. When the fighting ended, Jackson persuaded the president to name him Treaty Commissioner for Indian Affairs. From 1814 to 1824, Jackson negotiated a series of treaties that gave white settlers three-fourths of Alabama and Florida, one-third of Tennessee, one-fifth of Georgia and Mississippi and parts of Kentucky and North Carolina. Settlers desperately needing land would move onto


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Indian lands. When the Indians complained, Jackson said there was nothing he could do about this trespass; it was a question of states' rights. These land expropriations laid the foundation for the cotton kingdom supported by the labor of slaves. Jackson, was a slave owner himself as well as a liar and speculator not above using bribery to acquire more land. He wore the genocidal mantle of the Spanish conquistadores of the preceding century. In 1814, Jackson recruited frontiersmen to fight the British at New Orleans and defeated the British Redcoats. Jackson also succeeded in taking land in Florida from the Seminole Indians who from time to time engaged in hit and run attacks on the white settlers that settled on their land. Moving to Tennessee, Jackson was elected to the House and later to the Senate in 1818 where his record was spotty, but good enough to encourage a run at the presidency. He was elected in 1828 as president and served in the White House for two terms. His successor was Martin van Buren. The Supreme Court did nothing to relieve the plight of the Indians of the nineteenth Century during the Jacksonian presidency. In fact, its record is one of institutional impotency. Johnson v. McIntosh, 24 U.S. (1823); Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. 1 (1831); and Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. 515 (1832) are only three examples. In Worcester, the court declared a series of Georgia actions as void and repugnant to the Constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States. These included seizing tribal lands, executing Indian citizens who were not allowed to testify in federal court, and requiring the minister Samuel Worcester to have a Georgia permit to live in Cherokee County. The court mandate in this case left the Cherokees with a decision in their favor but with no effective remedy. Jackson is thought to have said, "Chief Justice John Marshall has made his ruling, now let him enforce it." Whether he said this or not, the result was the same. Georgians remained on Cherokee soil enforcing Georgia laws, while Samuel Worcester remained in jail for violation of a Georgia law the Supreme Court had held was unconstitutional. Despite court decisions upholding Cherokee land rights, their land was given away by lottery, and troops drove the Indians into prison stockades to wait for what turned out to be the death march out of Georgia. In the winter of 1838-39, sixteen thousand Cherokees were driven at gunpoint from their ancestral homeland over what has become known as the "Trail of Tears." More than four thousand of their numbers died on the way to Arkansas where, by the 1835 Treaty of New Echota, the Cherokees acquired title to minerals in the riverbed of the Arkansas River. However, their problems had not ended with this solemn treaty with the United States. In the 1960s, the United States took the Arkansas River for a


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federally funded project. The real property was valued at $177 million. To date, Congress has never appropriated funds to compensate the Cherokees and the Choctaw Indians for this taking, notwithstanding two favorable decisions of the Supreme Court. Choctaw Nation v. Oklahoma, 397 U.S. 620 (1970) and United States v. Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, 480 U.S. 700(1987). In 1824 Andrew Jackson ran for president as did Patrick Henry and John Quincy Adams. None of them got a majority of the electoral votes, so the election was decided in the House under Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution. The House decided in favor of Adams. This setback only whetted Jackson's appetite for the presidency, and he was elected in 1828. As president in 1829, Andrew Jackson expanded the spoils system -reward your friends by hiring them, an earlier version of patronage. Later, Congress enacted the law establishing the Civil Service to deal with excesses of patronage. Jackson may have been the first president to deal with nullification, a doctrine by which states claimed power to declare a federal law enacted by Congress unconstitutional. South Carolina led the way in applying this doctrine when the state declared certain tariffs on imports unconstitutional. Jackson sent units of the Army to quell this disturbance which rapidly subsided in the face of force. John C. Calhoun, a fiery orator and vice president in 1828 argued that the Constitution was a compact among the sovereign states whereby they had delegated limited powers to the federal government. If the state believed the government had overreached its authority, it could call a special convention, declare the act in question unconstitutional, and nullify its operation within the state. Following the South Carolina attempt to nullify tariffs, the next three decades saw further arguments on nullification and a state's right to secede became a constitutional right in the South. It saw the end of slavery and demanded the right to secede to protect this institution. Notwithstanding his outrageous conduct in matters affecting the Indians, Andrew Jackson had learned the liberal rhetoric of the times. In his book, The Age of Jackson, Robert Remini wrote that "Jackson himself enjoyed widespread support that ranged across all classes and sections of the country. He attracted farmers, mechanics, laborers, professionals, and even businessmen." All was not well, however, during Jackson's and Van Buren's administrations. In 1837, the northeast was troubled by the economic crisis that followed completion of the Erie Canal. Furthermore, Jackson had precipitated the Panic of 1837. In 1836, Jackson had directed all land-agents to accept nothing but specie for land sold to speculators. Specie was coined money, usually with a modest amount of gold. This specie was deposited in banks established by the


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various states. However, Congress enacted a law distributing $35 million worth of excess funds, the public debt having been paid. Banks had inflated the value of specie deposited with them and made loans based on these inflated values. When government-authorized drafts were presented to the banks for payment to state Treasuries, the eighty or so banks had to call the loans. Together with a steep decline in the price of cotton, the combination led to the Panic of 1837. It lasted about seven years and well into the administration of President Martin van Buren (1838-1842). In 1843, Dorothea Dix addressed the Massachusetts State Legislature and gave a speech from her notes that shocked the conscience of the legislators. "I proceed, Gentlemen," she said, "briefly to call your attention to the present state of Insane Persons confined within this Commonwealth, in cages, closets, stalls, pens. Chained, naked, beaten with rods and lashed into obedience." (Italics in the original). David Gollaher has written an arresting book, Voice for the Mad: The Life of Dorothea Dix. In his Prologue, Gollaher said that Dorothea Dix was "the first [person] to give madness a human face." With some help from political friends, Dorothea Dix drafted an ambitious measure to set aside 10 million acres of public land that might be sold to provide a perpetual fund for care of the indigent insane. It finally passed both the House and the Senate only to be vetoed by President Franklin Pierce in 1854. The vote to override his veto failed. Pierce advanced constitutional arguments to justify his veto, but in reality the slavery debate heated up with Stephen Douglas proposing a measure to deal with the Kansas-Nebraska dispute which diverted attention from her humanitarian proposal. To chronicle the status from her Memorial to the Massachusetts Legislature of 1843 and the status of the insane today is not the purpose of this book. However, Mary Jane Ward's Snake Pit of 1959 demonstrates how little progress the nation has made in dealing with its mentally ill population. Most estimates today in 1996 suggest that fully 35 percent of the homeless on the streets of urban America are mentally ill. Governments have consistently have reduced funding for public institutions for the mentally ill. Only three years after Dorothea Dix's political setback, another case decided by the Supreme Court inflamed both sides of the slavery debate. Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1957), also known as the infamous Dred Scott Case. Writing for seven justices of the court, Chief Justice Roger Taney held the slaves were property protected by the Constitution, that the Missouri Compromise of 1850 was an unconstitutional exercise of power by Congress, and that Scott, never having been free, was still a slave. This decision triggered violent reaction, unleashing irreconcilable partisan passions and clearly crystallized opinions making civil war inevitable. When it did begin, Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke out in 1862, urging that


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emancipating the slaves was the best way to solidify the North, a speech brought to Abraham Lincoln's attention. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a literary giant of the mid-eighteenth Century, had many well known contemporaries, including Henry James, Henry Thoreau, and Thomas Carlyle. Emerson is well known for his writing, but his reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1851 is worth noting.This measure required the states of the North to return to their owners slaves who had escaped from their owners in the South. Five months after its passage by Congress, a black man named Shadrach Minkins was arrested in Boston. He was immediately arraigned. Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw (Herman Melville's father-in-law) refused a writ of habeas corpus, a writ determining the power of the court to detain a person. The court adjourned by noon, but Minkins was spirited away by a group of black members of the Boston Vigilance Committee. The South was enraged. Soon, another slave from the South, Thomas Sims, was arrested in Boston. This time the authorities took no chances. After Shaw refused to hold the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional, Sims was escorted to the ship that took him back to Savannah from where he had fled as a fugitive. On April 19, 1851, the anniversary of the Battle of Concord, Sims was taken ashore in Savannah and publicly whipped. More than any other episode in his life, the Sims case converted Emerson from an abolitionist to an activist. A few weeks after this episode, Emerson gave a speech that called on Massachusetts to honor its revolutionary past by resisting the Fugitive Slave Act. He attacked Daniel Webster in strong abusive terms, accusing him of "taking the bit in his mouth and the collar on his neck and harnessing himself to the chariot of the [Southern] planters." Webster had made an about-face on the Fugitive Slave Act, and this enraged Emerson. In another speech, he wrote that "This has ceased to be a representative government when the statute itself fastens penalties of treason on acts of common humanity." by Robert D. Richardson, Jr. is a wide-ranging biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson. His speeches appear in another book, and requires attention from students of the period. Still another giant of this period was Abraham Lincoln who was born in 1809. His destiny was surely affected by those around him, including Emerson and many others, even thought it is uncertain if he read any of Emerson's works or even knew him. Lincoln by David H. Donald is the latest of many biographies of this giant; it was published by Simon & Schuster in 1995. Its author noted that Lincoln enjoyed reading and had committed to memory long passages from William Shakespeare's plays. However, Lincoln would have been twenty-eight years old at the time of the Panic of 1837. After a few years as a surveyor, Lincoln ran successfully for the legislature of Illinois after studying for the law.


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Lincoln supported internal improvements within Illinois, including railroads and canals, but the Panic of 1837 effectively killed these plans, and some people tried to blame the mess of unfinished roads and canals on Lincoln. He did not suffer politically as a result; most people thought it was Stephen Douglas that was responsible, not Lincoln. During this formative period of Lincoln's life, he was a Whig, a political party formed probably in 1834 in opposition to the Democratic party. It favored economic expansion and a high protective tariff, while opposing the strength of the presidency in relation to the legislature. In 1856, the Republican party was formed in Ripon, Wisconsin, and it spread nationally, at least as to those states that had joined the union about to splinter with the coming of the inevitable Civil War. Notwithstanding fierce opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act, it quickly became embedded in American culture, in part through Harriet Beecher Stowe's instant bestseller, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). About half this novel focused on the plight of the slave Eliza and her son, who escaped across the Ohio River to freedom. Ableman v. Booth, 62 U.S. 506 (1859). Sherman Booth, a prominent Republican editor, was arrested in Wisconsin for helping rescue a fugitive slave. Booth sought his release from a state court via habeas corpus, and he was released from custody. On appeal, the Supreme Court of Wisconsin held the Fugitive Slave Act was unconstitutional and refused to send a record of the case when it reached the Supreme Court of the United States. Writing for a unanimous court, Chief Justice Taney held that every state in the union was obligated "to support this constitution" and that "no power is more clearly conferred than the power of this court to decide ultimately and finally all cases" arising under the federal Constitution. The Supremacy Clause made the Supreme Court "strong enough to execute its laws by its own tribunals, without interruption from a state or from state authorities." In 1859, John Brown, a dedicated abolitionist, raided Harpers Ferry to draw attention to the plight of slaves. He was captured by federal troops, tried, convicted and hung in Charlestown, West Virginia. Brown's exploits inflamed tensions between the nation's pro- and anti-slavery factions. To the abolitionists of the North, Brown was a hero.


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The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 acquired land for the United States as far west as the Rocky Mountains. President Thomas Jefferson, by buying this land from France, doubled the size of the new nation. Yet large areas of its land mass were occupied by other nations. To the southwest was Mexico, which had won its independence in a revolutionary war against Spain in 1821 -- a large country that included Texas and what is now New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California and part of Colorado. As recently as 1960, the Supreme Court had to settle the boundaries of Texas as well as the right of all the states on the Gulf of Mexico to oil and minerals underlying the continental shelf. United States v. Louisiana, Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama and California, 363 U.S. 1 (1960).

The territories of the US during its expansion in the 19th Century

The opinion of the court was long and complicated with complex issues resting on history. In Pollard's Lessee. v. Hagan, 3 Howard 212 (1802), the court announced a rule it proposed to apply to the admissions of states other than the original thirteen colonies. By virtue of their sovereignty through revolution, these original thirteen states owned the lands beneath their navigable waters, but submerged land beneath coastal sea was left in an ambiguous area. In United States v. Louisiana et al, the Supreme Court tried to provide equal treatment, but the issues had gotten quite complicated. Florida, for example, claimed three leagues seaward as its boundary, but this claim was made after its secession during the Civil War. Texas was the most difficult problem for the court. It was admitted to the Union in 1845 as the only independent nation ever admitted. In March, 1837 the United States recognized the Republic of Texas having declared its independence from Mexico a year earlier. The Texas Congress passed a measure defining its boundaries as extending three leagues seaward from the coastline. Evidently, part of what is now Texas had once been included in the land ceded by France to the United States by the Treaty of Paris in 1803 -- the Louisiana Purchase. France had acquired the land from Spain which in turn entered into a treaty with the United States in 1819. Quite a few people involved in the negotiations Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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then believed that the Louisiana Territory extended west from the Sabine River that Texas claimed as its eastern boundary. These people decried the Treaty of 1819 as a breach of faith by the United States in violation of the Treaty of Paris in 1803. Unsurprisingly, the Joint Resolution of Congress for the Annexation of Texas in 1845 provided for a survey to settle boundary questions. The Supreme Court did not mention an additional complication. Should Texas be admitted as a slave or free state in 1845, and supporters of slavery in Congress prevailed. In 1854, two territories were opened to slavery by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of that year. Senator Stephen Douglas, a Democrat from Illinois, was Chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories. From this position, he had the power and influence to push this measure through both the Senate and the House. It was Senator Douglas' position that popular sovereignty should allow Kansas and Nebraska voters to decide whether either state would be slave or free. The Act itself read in part that the territory "when admitted as a state or states....shall be admitted into the Union, with or without slavery, as their constitutions may prescribe." This language appeared in the Compromise of 1850 in which both Utah and New Mexico had been admitted to the Union. Lincoln and all the other antislavery spokesmen were infuriated by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In 1854, Lincoln held no public office in Illinois, but he secretly thought of the Senate with encouragement from his many supporters. However, Lincoln had a problem. Were he to run successfully for the Illinois legislature, he could not vote for himself when the State Legislature elected a Senator in 1855. Unfortunately, Lincoln was compelled to ask his supporters in the State Legislature to vote for Lyman Trumbull, a Democrat, but one violently opposed to slavery. During the period between 1854 and 1855, Lincoln followed Senator Douglas around Illinois as a sort of truth in campaigning committee of one. Lincoln also saw the Whig Party of which he was a member falling apart. Some prominent Whigs joined the Know Nothing Party. Its members were hostile to foreigners, suspicious of the Catholic Church, and opposed to the sale of alcoholic beverages. The Democrats of this period were proslavery, having supported the Compromise of 1850. Finally, a fusion party was formed with a platform calling for restoration of the Missouri Compromise, upheld the Fugitive Slave Act of 1851, and pledged noninterference with slavery in states where it already existed. However, the platform also stated that Congress had the power and duty to exclude slavery from the territories. So, on May 29, 1856 Lincoln addressed the first convention of the new Republican Party of Illinois. Lincoln was nominated, but did not get the position as vice president with John Fremont as the Republican's candidate for president. This


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combination -- Fremont and Dayton -- lost to James Buchanan, a Democrat, in the 1856 elections. The turmoil surrounding the slavery issue spilled over into the 1856 presidential nominating convention of the Republicans. John Fremont was nominated for president, and Lincoln almost made it to the vice presidential nomination but finally lost. He was a strong party supporter of the Republicans and made many campaign speeches, but in November, 1856 Fremont lost to James Buchanan. A year later, the Supreme Court made its most outrageous decision in all its history, Scott v. Sandford 60 U.S. 393 (1857). Also known as the Dred Scott Case, seven justices of the court, five of then southerners, held that black Americans were property and had no rights of any kind. Stephen Douglas defended this decision, but Lincoln was slow to react. Instead, he began planning his campaign for election to the Senate by the Illinois State Legislature in 1858. Alarmed by the violence in Kansas, President Buchanan demanded the speedy admission of Kansas as a state. The Constitution for Kansas was submitted for approval in Washington. It was a proslavery document, and Buchanan, a Democrat, recommended approval in sending it to Congress. Abraham Lincoln could not run for direct election to the Senate in 1858, so he worked carefully in Illinois. However, the Democrats came in with the majority needed to control the choice of Senator. Lincoln's bitter enemy, Stephen Douglas, was reelected to the Senate by the State Legislature. Lincoln's fortunes began to improve in 1859, and he made political speeches in all the important states of the East, including New York, Ohio, New Hampshire, and Connecticut. In terms of westward expansion of the population, Lincoln sold himself as a champion of free soil and opposed to any further slave states in the new territories. California had been admitted to the Union in 1849 as a free state. The gold rush of 1848 had encouraged permanent settlers to migrate to the new state and make their fortunes mining gold or even better, selling supplies to the miners. Before California was admitted, President Polk had ordered his troops to position themselves on what was clearly Mexican soil at the time in order to advance toward the then-in 1845-California whose sovereign was Mexico. Texas had been admitted to the Union in 1845, but its boundaries were not exact at all. American lives were lost in a skirmish with Mexican forces, and the impatient President Polk asked his Cabinet to authorize a declaration of war against Mexico. He mentioned that the dispatch of American troops to the Rio Grande as necessary to the defense of the United States. Actually, the reverse was true. President Polk had incited war by sending American forces into what was clearly disputed territory, historically Mexican. In any case, thousands of volunteers flocked to the colors. Quite a few more thoughtful Americans felt differently, noting that


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seizure of this Mexican territory would extend the area where slavery would flourish. In the summer of 1856, Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax and denounced the Mexican War. He was jailed for contempt, but some friends came to his relief. Two years later, he gave his speech in a lecture "Resistance to Civil Government." It was later published as an essay, Civil Disobedience. A Baptist minister, the Reverend Francis Wayland, president of Brown University spoke in the college chapel. "Only wars of self-defense were just," he said. "An individual was morally obligated to resist an unjust war and lend no money to the goverment to support it." Over a hundred and forty years later, many students did just that, including President Bill Clinton during the War in Vietnam. Notwithstanding some opposition to war, fighting broke out on two fronts, one in California and New Mexico with troops led by General Kearney and another in Mexico led by General Taylor. The latter's forces moved south through Mexico all the way to Mexico City plagued by illness and desertions on the part of soldiers who had not been paid. Thousands of casualties on both sides finally led to Mexico's surrender and the signing of ther Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. The boundary of Texas was set at the Rio Grande and both New Mexico and California were ceded to the United States. It got by conquest what belonged to Mexico, a sorry episode in American history and Mexico was paid a paltry $15 million for the land it gave up. This foreign adventurism all occurred at a time when slavery was very much of an issue. The antebellum South was a slave society, not merely a society in which some people were slaves. From the early years of European settlement, Southern agriculture was geared toward production of staple crops. These crops increasingly featured tobacco and cotton, both labor intensive. Significantly, however, outside observers saw the South as backward. Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead spent fourteen months preparing articles for the, described the South as a degraded land of poverty, illiteracy, ignorance, inefficiency, and lethargy in which slavery impeded economic development. New York Senator William Seward concurred. "It was necessary that I should travel to Virginia to have any idea of a slave state," he stated. "An exhausted soil, old and decaying towns, wretchedly neglected roads, and, in every respect, an absence of enterprise and improvement, distinguish the region. Such as been the effect of slavery." This comment appears in Eric Foner's Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War. (Oxford University Press, 1970). Throughout the North, individuals spoke out against slavery. William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79) was one of them and a leader of the Abolitionist


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movement. In 1829, when Andrew Jackson was president, Garrison gave his first address against slavery in Massachusetts. In the same year, he was an editor of a newspaper in Baltimore. One of his articles caused his arrest for libel, and Garrison served seven weeks of his sentence to jail. Two years later, he founded The Liberator, perhaps the best known antislavery newspapers of its time. Garrison also founded the Anti-Slavery Society and served as its president from 1833 to 1865. In Boston, he publicly burned a copy of the Constitution, saying "So perish all compromises with tyranny." The government of the United States supported slavery, or more accurately did nothing to end it except to condemn the slave trade. No president ever challenged the Fugitive Slave Act passed by Congress in 1850. At least in the South, the economic health of the entire region relied on slavery. By 1860, a million tons of cotton were produced in the South each year. From 1790 the number of slaves had increased from 500,000 to over four million by 1860. During this period, slave revolts occurred, always unsuccessfully. The slaves had no power. In 1811, a slave revolt occurred near New Orleans. It ended with some sixty-five slaves killed by the U.S. Army., and sixteen were tried and shot by firing squad. In 1822, the conspiracy amongst slaves to burn Charleston to the ground ended when thirty-five slaves were hanged. In 1831, Nat Turner's Rebellion in Virginia panicked the South spurring the plantation owners to bolster their security. Escape was more realistic than armed insurrection. In the 1850s, about 1,000 slaves escaped from the owners each year and got to the North via the Underground Railroad, an organization of people dedicated to the idea of freedom. Slavery was in fact an institution that dehumanized its victims and possibly some of its practitioners. At least one writer states that music, art and religion were the only way for slaves to hold on to their humanity. South had better prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question...You may dispose of me very easily....I am very nearly disposed of now, but this question is still to be settled -- this Negro question, I mean; the end of that is not in sight." In his last written statement, John Brown, before he was hanged, wrote: "I, John Brown, am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood." Ralph Waldo Emerson said of Brown's execution, "He will make the gallows holy as the cross." While the government did nothing by itself to end slavery, President Buchanan did have time to swindle the Indians again. In 1858, his administration found time to negotiate a treaty with the Sioux Indians. By its terms, ratified by the Senate as a solemn treaty in 1859, the Sioux of Yankton, North Dakotah ceded millions of acres of their tribal land and ancestral hunting grounds to the United States. In return, the Sioux


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reserved for themselves and their descendants about 430,000 acres. Instead of cash, the government agreed to supply food, clothing, farm implements, livestock, and other necessities to convert the area from a hunting ground to an agricultural society. Within two years after the treaty was signed, the government's Indian agent, a man named Burleigh, had appropriated to his own use most of the supplies sent for use by the Indians. When the Sioux demanded an accounting, Burleigh refused, and it took the Army at Fort Randall to save him and prevent the building from being torched. This story came from the autobiography of Russell Means, Where White Men Fear to Tread published in 1995 by the St. Martin's Press. Today, America's tribal schools are crumbling because of budget cuts, inefficiency and neglect by the government's Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). In their treaties with the Sioux and other Indian tribes, the United States had promised to educate American Indian children. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is required to finance tribal schools at the same per student average for their state. This promise has not been kept for years, and Congress doesn't even appropriate enough funds to keep existing schools in reasonable condition or replace those falling apart for lack of maintenance. The BIA has an unfulfilled responsibility of about $675 million in repair costs alone for the nation's 187 schools. There are a growing number of Indian children. By 1996 there was increase to about 50,000 compared to 47,000 in 1993. In 1860, over 135 years ago, Abraham Lincoln ran for president as a Republican. He won with about 1.8 million popular votes, but not a single one of them from any of the ten Southern states. In fact, Lincoln's share of the total popular vote was only forty percent, less than Bill Clinton got in 1992 by two percent. Formidable problems faced Lincoln even before his inauguration in March, 1861. Within a month, every Southern state had taken steps in the direction of secession from the Union. Even before the electoral votes were counted, the ten states of the South -- eleven counting Texas -- had drawn up a constitution for the new Confederate States of America. On March 4, 1861 Lincoln, having toned down a somewhat warlike inaugural address, delivered it, and on the next day, the South decided that war was inevitable. Lincoln's advisers told him the Fort Sumter had to be resupplied and that a surrender of that fort would be a political disaster. An attempt to resupply Fort Sumter by sea was made, but South Carolina's governor had been told that only food and other peaceful supplies were to be delivered. On April 12, 1861, while ships were ready to offload supplies at Fort Sumter, Confederate forces shelled this fort, and within forty-eight hours, its commander had to surrender. War had begun. President Lincoln called for a militia of 75,000 soldiers to defend the Union and called a special session of Congress to meet on July 4, 1861. Some border Southern states refused to supply troops, and North Carolina,


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Virginia, Arkansas, and Tennessee promptly seceded, joining the Confereracy with its capital in Richmond,Virginia. Throughout the war, Lincoln described the conflict as an insurrection or rebellion. To describe it as a war between the states would acknowledge that the Union was not perpetual and that secession was constitutional. Additionally, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, an act immediately challenged in court. Chief Justice Roger Taney questioned the president's action in, Ex parte Merryman, F. Cas. 9487 (1861). John Merryman was a proConfederate Maryland political leader, who was arrested for participating in the destruction of a key bridge into Washington. Merryman petitioned Chief Justice Taney for a writ of habeas corpus. Taney issued the writ, but the military commander to whom it was addressed refused to produce Merryman in view of Lincoln's suspension of the writ. Taney later declared Merryman was entitled to his freedom, since he held that only Congress could suspend the writ of habeas corpus. Lincoln prevailed in his dispute with Taney. The Constitution did not expressly state who might order suspension, but in an emergency, action had to be taken to protect the public safety. Furthermore, Lincoln had taken an oath of office to faithfully execute the laws of the United States. In April, 1861 Lincoln ordered a naval blockade of Confederate ports. Its legality was challenged in the Prize Cases 67 U. S. 635 (1863). In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court held the blockade was legal. The majority argued that if a state of war recognized by international law existed, captures of Confederate ships were legitimate. If such a war did not exist when the executive imposed the blockade, the captures were illegal. According to Justice Grier's majority opinion, a state of war existed in April, 1861 justifying resort to a blockade. Although the conflict had begun as an insurrection against the federal government and without a formal declaration of war, it was nevertheless a war, a civil war. Justice Grier also stated that it was for the president as commander-in-chief to decide whether in suppressing an insurrection it was justifiable to treat the opponents as belligerents. Those readers with an interest in the battles of the Civil War that ended in 1865 with the surrender of Confederate forces at Appomatox Courthouse may wish to read In the Hands of Providence: Joshua L. Chamberlain & the American Civil War. It was published in 1995 by The University of North Carolina Press and written by Alice Rains Trulock. Chamberlain established a remarkable career during the Civil War. An academic and theologian by training, this young professor at Bowdoin College agreed to accept a commission as a lieutenant colonel in the Twentieth Maine Volunteer Regiment. He fought at Antietam and Frederickson and then led his regiment to glory at Gettysburg, where he ordered the brilliant charge that saved Little Round Top on the afternoon of July 2, 1863 and avoided a Union catastrophe. Subsequently promoted


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to general, he was given the honor of receiving the Confederate surrender at Appomatox. There Chamberlain endeared himself to succeeding generations with his unforgettable salute to Robert E. Lee. He later served four terms as governor of Maine and then became president of Bowdoin College. Chamberlain died in 1914. Reconstruction of the Union after the war presented some daunting problems for Abraham Lincoln. In 1863, he issued an executive order that dealt with the postwar status of the slaves and requiring the states seceding from the Union in 1861 to adopt constitutions abolishing slavery as a condition of re-admission to the Union. Lincoln was reelected in 1864 with Andrew Johnson as his vice president, but he was assassinted by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865 in the Ford Theater. Booth and his coconspirators had put together a plan to murder Lincoln, the vice president and the Secretary of State, William Seward. Booth felt that success of the triple assassinations would so demoralize the country that the South might still gain its independence. However, only Lincoln died that night, although Seward barely survived an attack on him at home. Booth was captured in Virginia, and his co-conspirators were all arrested and tried. Despite action anticipating the end of the Civil War, the Supreme Court had been so politicized by the conflict, it struck down federal and state requirements that individuals swear loyalty to the Union as a condition of practicing their professions. By contemporary standards, the court acted properly, but here the holding allowed former secessionists to regain political power in the South. These early Reconstruction decisions combined with President Johnson's veto of civil rights legislation as well as his pardons of and grants of amnesty to Confederates were obstacles to the establishment of the Freedmens' Bureau Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and 1868. Congress approved and the states ratified three amendments to the Constitution, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. The 13th Amendment: Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section2. Congress shall power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The 14th Amendment:


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Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State in which they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, withjout due proces of law; nor deny any person within its jurisdiction ther equal protection of the laws. Section 2. Text omitted Section 3. Text omitted Section 4. Text omitted Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

The 15th Amendment: Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Although the court was dominated by Republicans -- Lincoln had appointed Salmon Chase to replace Roger Taney as Chief Justice -- it split over questions involving executive power. Nor was the court genderconscious. In 1873, it denied a challenge by Myra Bladwell alleging denial of her admission to the Illinois bar association was a violation of the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the newly-ratified Fourteenth Amendment. See Bradwell v. Illinois 83 U.S. 130 (1873). Both newspapers and magazines of the Reconstruction period were filled with articles refighting the Civil War. Frederick Douglass wrote one in Volume 18 of the Atlantic Monthly of 1866 noting that the Second Session of the Thirty-ninth Congress might "properly be made the occasion of a few earnest words on the much-worn topic of reconstruction." What follows was retrieved via the Internet from the University of Virginia Electronic Text Center. Douglass, a distinguished black advocate, had urged Lincoln to draft blacks in 1862. The Confiscation Act of 1862 specifically authorized enlistment of black volunteers, but Lincoln was reluctant to follow so revolutionary a policy. Douglas wrote in the fiery language used by him in speeches. Seldom has any legislative body been the subject of a solicitude more intense, or of aspirations more sincere and ardent. There are the best of reasons for this profound interest. Questions of vast moment, left undecided by the last session of Congress, must be manfully grappled with by this. No political skirmishing


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will avail. The occasion demands statesmanship. Whether the tremendous war so heroically and so victoriously ended shall pass into history a miserable failure, barren of permanent results, -- a scandalous and shocking waste of treasure, -- a strife for empire, as Earl Russell characterized it, of no value to liberty or civilization, -- an attempt to re-establish a Union by force, which must be the merest mockery of a Union, -an effort to bring under Federal authority which no loyal man from the North may safely enter, and to bring men into the national councils who deliberate with daggers and vote with revolvers, and who do not even conceal their deadly hate of the country that conquered them, or whether, on the other hand, we shall, as the rightful reward of victory over treason, have a solid nation, entirely delivered from all contradictions and social antagonisms, based on loyalty, liberty,and equality, must be determined one way or the other by the present session of Congress. The last session really did nothing which can be considered final as to these questions.

Frederick Douglass, a Northerner exercized the power of moral authority. He had been influential in getting blacks to enlist in the volunteer army of a country that was half slave and half free. By the end of the Civil War over 100,000 of them were serving. On one occasion while the Civil War was still being fought, Lincoln consulted Douglass about a letter he planned to send. In it, Lincoln had some thoughts on a peace that did not include the abolition of slavery. Douglass exploded with anger, saying: "It would be given a broader meaning than you intend to convey. It would be taken as a complete surrender of your antislavery policy, and do you serious damage." Lincoln never sent the letter. Violence from the defeated South began immediately after the war ended. The Ku Klux Klan was organized with financial support from most whites in the deep South. Simply put, the South was entirely anti-black and fought tooth and nail to resist even the minimum efforts to both free the slaves and improve their environment. Ku Klux Klan violence, including lynching and whipping would continue into the 1960s and the civil rights movement. However, the Reconstruction era really ended with the electoral vote compromise of 1877. At the beginning of the year, the presidential election was over, but Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden had 184 electoral votes and needed only one more to win. Three states with 19 electoral votes had not yet been counted. Rutherford Hayes might win if he got all 19 votes. So a deal was made, and for political reasons, all 19 votes were given to Hayes who became president in 1877. As C. Vann Woodward puts it in his history of the 1877 Compromise, Reunion and Reaction: "The Compromise of 1877 did not restore the old order in the South. It did assure the dominant whites political autonomy and nonintervention in matters of race policy and promised them a share in the blessings of the new economic order. In return, the South became, in effect, a satellite of the dominant region...."


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The first fruits of this Faustian bargain were not long in appearing. Congress repealed the Southern Homestead Act. This measure reserved huge areas of land in five states of the South for farmers who agreed to work the land. The repeal of this law allowed absentee speculators and lumbermen to move in and buy up much of this land at bargain basement prices; most of it was sold at a huge profit. The comparison with comparable conduct of the Republicans elected to Congress in 1994 seems no different from that in 1877. The new Republicans with their control of both the House and Senate seemed determined to set the clock back to the time when class-based war, not all of it non-violent, occurred after the Reconstruction era.

Between the Gold Rush of 1848 and the beginning of the Civil War, thousands of emigrants headed west beyond the Missouri River. This wave of emigrants became a torrent after the Civil War. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered land free, or almost free to homesteaders, 160 acres for about $200. Without title to it, the government effectively gave Indian land to settlers. Indians had lived in Kansas and Oklahoma for generations, and this land represented not only their source of food but their sacred soil. The buffalo, for example, was a symbol of food, shelter, and clothing. The westward expansion of white emigrants was to continue in the face of Indian opposition and war to the end which really did not end until the final tragedy at Wounded Knee in December, 1890. The Sioux, the Cheyennes, Comanches, Apaches, Arapahoes, and the Kiowas inhabited land in a great arc beginning in Minnesota and ending in Arizona. They were the last obstacle to westward expansion, and they suffered as a result. Broken treaties and life on the reservations were ending a way of life for the proud Indians who had a culture and language going back several hundred years. The wars between the settlers and the Indians were certain to be won by the former; they had superior arms and more manpower. For a detailed account of this period, Dee Brown has written an excellent book, The American West published in 1994 by Scribner's. It contains a galaxy of famous characters: Geronimo, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and Generals Crook and Custer. This book simply ignores the Reconstruction Era, focusing instead on how the West was won.


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The Reconstruction Era, by most standards, ended in 1877, while the country was still in a depression that began in 1873. In that year, the banking firm of Jay Cooke announced it could no longer pay its depositors on demand. The firm lost a great deal of money trying to finance the Northern Pacific Railway Company. Other banks panicked and called in loans. With this contraction in credit, business could not borrow enough money to meet payroll and other costs, so they reduced the number of workers. Unemployment spread, and quite a number of banks failed. However, even before this date, forces were at work shaping the outlines of a modern economy dominated by corporate capitalism. The railroads were the engine of growth and expansion to the West, and their construction using immigrant labor created many great fortunes. However, water transportation on the Mississippi as far as St. Louis was used even before the Civil War. The Erie Canal, which connected the Hudson River with the Great Lakes was opened in 1825. Before their appearance on the scene, cities and towns survived in virtual isolation except for such primitive transportation as the horse-drawn wagon which carried mostly agricultural products over short distances in the new lands of the West. Gradually, rail connections were built to connect Washington and New York to Boston, Chicago, and St. Louis. In the South, Martinsburg, West Virginia was a transportation hub with lines to Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and New Orleans. Initially, the builders used different gauge track. Finally, a standard gauge was established, and by 1880 most of the trackage in the United States used the standard gauge rails. By 1877, the Union PacificCentral Pacific complex was the only rail company to reach San Francisco. The Southern Pacific out of San Francisco, reached New Orleans in 1882. The Great Northern out of St. Paul, Minnesota reached Everette, Washington in 1893, and the first railroad that allowed direct transportation from Chicago to San Francisco was completed in 1892 at Promontory Point, Utah. It was built largely by Chinese labor, a fact that led to many pitched battles with other immigrant labor, some of it Irish. Most of the Chinese workers came from California which had been admitted to the Union in 1849. One of the more gruesome results of opening the West by rail was the slaughter of two million buffalo by roving bands of settlers within a period of five years after 1868. They killed the buffalo for the hides, leaving the carcases to rot on the land of Kansas and territories to the west. This land was traditionally used by Indians for hunting and gathering of food, clothing and shelter; tents were then made of buffalo hide. Finally, the Indians fought back and killed some settlers. General Sheridan immediately ordered five columns of American soldiers to hunt the Indians down and kill them. The Indians fought a losing battle, armed, as


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they were with only bows and arrows. Later, they managed to buy some guns, but it was too late to save the Indian culture. In the 1870's and 1880's, cowboys from Texas drove great herds of cattle -- several thousand at a time -- to the rail hubs in Colorado and Nebraska. From these hubs, the cattle were shipped by rail to Chicago for slaughter. This was the beginning of huge fortunes for the meat packing families, the Swifts, Armours and the Cudahys. The cattle barons of Texas grew rich themselves and the cowboys who went out on sprees after being paid were often met at the village limits and told they weren't welcome with their pistols. Wyatt Earp was one of the early marshals to enforce this ban on guns. Evidently, no one had ever pleaded the Second Amendment to the Constitution as giving the cowboys the right to bear arms and shoot up the town population after spending part of their pay in the local saloons. Between 1877 and 1892, a few men who saw themselves as nationbuilders managed to accumulate huge fortunes. Andrew Carnegie (steel), John D. Rockefeller (oil), Charles Pillsbury (flour), Andrew Mellon (banking), Phillip Armour (meatpacking), Gustavus Swift (meatpacking), J. P. Morgan (banking), Cornelius Vanderbilt (railroads), Marcus Daly (copper), John Jacob Astor and James Duke (tobacco) were only a few of them. Duke found and used a new cigarette-rolling machine that could turn out 100,000 cigarettes a day. Duke also put together the American Tobacco Company by combining the four largest cigarette companies.These men saw expansion to the West as an economic opportunity requiring a combination of rail transportation using free land, raw materials, cheap labor, new technology. The first transcontinental telegraph line was completed in 1861, and a huge, expanding market of consumers for everything manufactured flourished in the new West. In the period from 1860 to 1914, the foundation for a consumptionbased economy was built, and the United States needed economic historians. These historians keep track of statistics showing economic growth, gross domestic product (GDP), productivity, income and other variables. The Constitution requires a Decennial Census, and economic data from the Census is available for every ten-year period since 1800. This census also shows population figures nationally and by state. Most of these are available in the Statistical Abstract of the United States for each year. The last full year for this data was 1994. Economic historians may also use independent sources to support their analyses, such as the public records of the builders of the Erie Canal which was completed in 1825. Copper, iron, coal, oil, aluminum (bauxite), silver, and gold were the basic raw materials used in the expanding economy of the nineteenth Century. Trees for lumber and silicon for glass -- computer chips in the


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twentieth Century -- were all abundant. There was a huge and westwardexpanding market for housing. Wheat and corn had to be grown, harvested, and processed for sale. In 1850, Deere & Company and International Harvester, both in Illinois, manufactured and sold farm equipment, and the former is now in 1996, the world's largest manufacturer of farm implements. Toward the end of the nineteenth Century, a new factor, electricity, helped increase production in some industries, so power plants and hydroelectric dams had to be built to generate electricity. Initially, oil was refined to produce kerosene for illumination of the lamps so many people had in their homes. Later, oil was essential for autos. Not all these industrial enterprises grew at the same rate, and the officers of at least one of them would be described as predatory. Although he died in 1848, Astor had already created one of the first business monopolies, the American Fur Company. At the time of his death in 1848, John Jacob Astor was the wealthiest man in the United States and owned an enormous amount of real estate in New York City. He bequeathed most of his fortune of $20 million to his children. Astor organized the fur trade from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean and from there to Japan and China and then using money from the sale of fur, he bought tea and sold it in the United States at a great profit. One of his descendants, William B. Astor more than doubled the family fortune by building hundreds of stores and housing on the land acquired by his father. Gustavus Myers makes a point in his book, History of the Great American Fortunes, state and local laws were enacted for the benefit of the landlords and merchants. He comments on this fact of business life in discussing the growth of the Astor family fortune, much of it derived from the rental of New York tenements. Is it not murder, when, compelled by want, people are forced to fester in squalid, germ-filled tenements, where the sunlight never enters and where disease finds a prolific breeding-place? Untold thousands went to their deaths in these unspeakable places. Yet, so far as the Law is concerned, the rents collected by the Astors, as well as by other landlords, were honestly made. The whole institution of Law saw nothing out of the way in these conditions, and very significantly so, because, to repeat over and over again, Law did not represent the ethics or ideals of advanced humanity; it exactly reflected, as a pool reflects the sky, the demands and self-interest of the growing propertied class...

Charles Pillsbury moved to St. Paul in 1867 and invested his modest capital in the milling trade. Using rail transportation, his mill bought wheat in the Dakotas, converted it to flour and sold it processed in the East. An enlightened capitalist, Pillsbury was probably the first owner to introduce a profit sharing plan for his employees.


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John D. Rockefeller was a predator. He wanted nothing less than a near-monopoly of oil refining capacity in the United States and got it. He either bought out competitors at bargain prices or drove them out of business by selling his own oil at artificially low prices. The Standard Oil Company was finally dissolved into various companies still selling oil, but free of a charge of unreasonable restraint of trade. Standard Oil Company v. United States, 221 U.S. 1 (1911). Long before the Supreme Court curbed Rockefeller's monopoly, he had taken on and beaten a major adversary, the Pennsylvania Railroad which owned the Empire Transportation Company and its pipelines from oil producing fields to refineries. Rockefeller dictated the terms of surrender. Standard Oil acquired all the pipelines, so it dominated the routes from the wells to the railroads. Rockefeller brought the Pennsylvania Railroad to its knees by arranging for oil to be carried on the New York Central and the Erie Railroad, both allied with Standard Oil. By 1877, the Pennsylvania Railroad was paying Standard Oil 8 cents a barrel for the privilege of carrying Rockefeller's oil. Some historians argue that the Pennsylvania Railroad was willing to settle because of the railroad strike in 1877. This strike began with wage cuts made by railroad after railroad. Brakemen and personnel working in jobs considered unsafe by management, were paid $1.75 a day for a 12-hour day. In Martinsburg, West Virginia, Baltimore & Ohio workers decided to fight the cut and went out on strike. They uncoupled the engines and ran them into the roundhouse, announcing no more trains would leave until the 10 percent wage cut was rescinded. The crowd that showed up to support the strike was too big for the local police to disperse. Railroad officials asked the governor for help. The governor sent the National Guard. This was unreliable since many of its members were workers, so the governor asked President Rutherford Hayes for help, and the army turned up. In Baltimore, bloody fighting between the soldiers and workers broke out in the streets. The strike spread to Pittsburgh and the Pennsylvania Railroad. The National Guard turned up in Pittsburgh. Its gunfire killed ten workers. The crowd erupted in anger. Railroad cars were set on fire.The depot was set on fire, and a burning grain elevator devastated a portion of the city when this fire spread. Most of the National Guard could not move as strikers in other cities held up transportation. Some of their members even mutinied and joined the supporting crowd. More killing of workers occurred in Reading. The strike spread to Chicago where crewmen refused to sail on cargo ships in Lake Michigan. In St. Louis, the Workingmen's Party called for a public meeting in support of the strike, and 5,000 people turned up. At least one newspaper referred to the Workingmen's Party as Communists, a pejorative term not in widespread use then; Socialists would have been more accurate. They wanted to nationalize industry. Finally, the momentum of the strike ended, and the police and militia took


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over. When the dust settled, 100 people were dead, most of them workers, 1,000 people were in jail, 100,000 people had gone on strike and more than half the freight on 75,000 miles of track had stopped moving. Working people had learned they did not yet have the power to defeat a combination of private capital and public power. Industrial expansion had its human costs. Workers were not paid enough to support their families, and this led to resistance. One of the imports from Europe, Great Britain's common law, was to produce unfortunate consequences in the United States. That common law made it a criminal conspiracy for one worker to join with another to ask for higher wages. It was almost impossible to organize labor unions without running afoul of this legal principle and its consequences, usually anti-strike injunctions, violence, and, for some, such as Eugene Debs, jail. The Pullman strike of 1877 was a terrible setback for labor, but it did produce one benefit nine years later, the "Memorial on the Knights of Labor" probably the most influential document ever written on the relationship of the Catholic Church in the United States to the labor movement. It was written in Rome and signed by the leaders of the church. It was addressed to Giovanni Cardinal Simeoni. He was Prefect of the Congregational de Propaganda Fide, the department of eccleasiastical government that had jurisdiction over the Church in missionary lands, the category in which the United States was placed by the Holy See in 1887. However, it was not until 1886, with the Haymarket Massacre, and scattered railway strikes that this benefit surfaced. All the members of the Knights of Labor were working men and some women, and the vast majority of them were Catholic. Many of them or their parents had been immigrants from Germany, Italy, Ireland or Great Britain. Many Americans blamed the Knights of Labor for all the violence and turmoil of these strikes and the violence that inevitably occurred when either the police, the militia, or the then equivalent of the National Guard failed to quell the violence without killing strikers. In any case, the Catholic Church intervened in a memorial signed by James Cardinal Gibbons in Baltimore even though the text was written in Rome. Although Cardinal Gibbons deplored the use of violence in any form in labor's attempt to gain recognition, he and his colleagues of the Church were convinced that the workers had been the victims of grave abuses by their employers. Beyond the goal of supporting the Knights of Labor -this organization had been condemned in Canada three years earlier by the Holy See -- they were determined to align the Church in America, not on the side of the enemies of labor when the overwhelming majority of the Church's members were working men and their families. Furthermore, these prelates were determined that the American people would not see the


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image of the Church as one upholding the rich and powerful. Accordingly, the Holy See declined to condemn the Knights of Labor. The text of the memorial appears in The Catholic Church and the Knights of Labor published in 1949 by the Catholic University Press. In 1887, it was read from the pulpit in most Catholic Churches of the United States and received national attention in the country's newspapers. The power of the Knights of Labor declined and shifted to the American Federation of Labor with so many of its early members drawn from Catholic ranks. During the last forty-five years of the Nineteenth Century, workers continued to organize, but with mixed results. The law itself represented the principal obstacle to progress toward organizing unions. The courts uniformly reasoned that a worker and his or her industrial employer had equal bargaining power at the time an employment contract was signed. Moreover, a worker injured on the job could not sue for injuries incurred on the job. The courts uniformly held the worker merely by signing a contract of employment assumed all the risks of injury in plants that were not subject to any safety standards. In his books, The Transformation of American Law: 1780-1860 and The Transformation of American Law: 1870-1960 The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy, both published by the Oxford University Press, Horwitz makes this point: "By the middle of the 19th Century, the legal system had been reshaped to the advantage of men of commerce and industry at the expense of farmers, workers, consumers, and other less powerful groups within the society....it actively promoted a legal redistribution of wealth against the weakest groups in the society." It was all right for women to go on strike in the textile mills of Massachusetts, but their children had to have food to avoid starvation, a condition no industrial manager had any interest in hearing about. And there was no strike fund to pay strikers for the necessities of life during a strike. Until it was ruled illegal in the twentieth Century, many workers were required to sign so-called yellow dog contracts. By their terms, a worker had to agree not to join a union during the period of his or her employment. Most, if not all industries were bitterly opposed to unions attempts to organize. In 1875, Irish members of a society called the Ancient Order of the Hibernians, went out on strike against the owners of anthracite coal mines. They were accused of crimes on the basis of testimony by a detective planted secretly amongst them. These Molly Maguires 1 were arrested, tried, and convicted. They were executed for the crime of striking against an inhuman reduction in wages. The opposition to unions took many other forms. In the 1870s, employers brought in immigrants newly arrived in the United States. They were often hired to break strikes or even replace striking workers. In one incident near Pittsburgh, three Italians were hired to replace coal miners. The Italians were killed, and a jury acquitted the miners. Black workers were not allowed to join white-organized unions, and hostility established the rules


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of coexistence between groups that had a common objective. In urban areas of the major cities, the working poor and their families lived in tenements with no running water, and raw sewage often flooded the streets. By contrast, a significant number of men established fortunes in the late nineteenth Century. Often, the fortunes might double for the benefit of the next generation, and there was no estate tax. For the most part these fortunes were built using a combination of business ingenuity, utter ruthlessness, guile, and bribery. Before the Civil War, for example, J. P. Morgan bought some rifles at bargain basement prices and sold them to the Army at a huge profit. However, the rifles were defective in that they would injure any user. There was a Congressional investigation, and Morgan was exonerated. Thomas Edison bribed legislators in New Jersey in order to insure legislation favorable to the Edison business affairs. Rockefeller was determined to vertically integrate the oil business, and he succeeded by conduct that would not survive the light of day in the twentieth Century. Utterly ruthless, he drove out all competition that even remotely threatened his oil empire. Most of these men knew each other and worked well together. Andrew Carnegie, for example, worked with J.P. Morgan to establish United States Steel Corporation, but at a huge profit to himself. Morgan was paid a commission of $150 million for his negligible role in creating the combination. He sold stock and bonds in the new corporation at a price far greater than the value of the combination. Congress played its part in this industrial drama. It imposed tariffs on imports of steel so high there was no foreign competition. Finally, combinations became so large they were monopolies, and Congress acted to harness these economic giants. It enacted the Sherman Act in 1890. Section 1 of the Act made a contract or combination in restraint of trade illegal. Essentially, Congress saw Section 1 as a way of halting widespread price fixing. Section 2 of the Sherman Act made it illegal to monopolize, attempt to monopolize or conspire to monopolize trade or commerce. Five years later, the Sherman Act was successfully challenged. United States v. E.C. Knight, 156 U.S. 1 (1895). In 1892, the American Sugar Refining Company, the corporate successor to the Sugar Trust, acquired all the stock of its leading competitors, thereby creating a combination in restraint of trade and probably a monopoly of the market for sugar. Using this monopoly, the combination could fix prices on a national scale. The Supreme Court did not agree. Chief Justice Melville Fuller wrote for the court with Justice Harlan dissenting. The court held that Congress exceeded the power granted to it by the Constitution under the Commerce Clause. By the end of the nineteenth Century, American Telephone & Telegraph Company had established a monopoly of


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interstate commerce in communication by phone or telegraph. This monopoly was to last until 1982, when the United States District Court forced AT&T to divest itself of regional Bell services and create independent regional companies. Pacific Telesis. NYNEX, Ameritech Bell Atlantic, and three others were spun off the parent company, AT&T. By 1896, westward expansion had pretty much ended except for Hawaii and Alaska. Alaska had been acquired by purchase from Russia in 1867 for $7 million in gold. At the time, William Seward was Secretary of State in the Grant Administration. (The Alaska Purchase was known by skeptical observers as "Seward's Folly.") Both Hawaii and Alaska were territories and did not become states until the 1950s. The end of the nineteenth Century saw the United States acquire more land in the War of 1896, the Phillippines, Wake Island and Guam in the Pacific Ocean, and Puerto Rico in the Atlantic Ocean. The Filipinos had no interest in becoming an American appendage, Emilio Aguinaldo was a leader of the insurrectos challenging the transfer of the Phillippines from Spain to the United States. It took three years of fierce fighting to crush this rebellion, and the insurgents suffered enormous casualties from war and disease. In the United States, the Anti-Imperialist League carried on a long campaign to educate the Americans on the evils of imperialism. The membership was composed of industrialists and scholars. Andrew Carnegie and William James were examples of the League's appeal to a cross-section of the public expressing moral outrage at this militaristic example of Manifest Destiny. The League also published letters written by servicemen in the Phillippines. From these letters, one gets the distinct impression that forces of the United States fired the first shots on orders of their superiors approved in Washington. The letters also showed an intense racism which represented of American sentiment at the time. According to various news sources, on average in every week from 1889 to 1903 a dozen black Americans were lynched, burned or mutilated, all without benefit of trial by jury or otherwise. To soldiers serving in the Phillippines, the natives could easily be identified as black -- the fact that they were brown ,didn't matter. They might be seen as Indians and viewed as disposable. One soldier wrote: "Our fighting blood was up, and we all wanted to kill 'niggers'....This shooting human beings beats rabbit hunting all to pieces." The Supreme Court was busy in 1896, two years before acquisition of the Phillippines by war. One of the most far-reaching of the court's decisions was Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). In this case, the court upheld the constitutional validity of a Louisiana statute that required railroads to provide "separate but equal accommodations for the white and colored races." Writing for the court, Justice Henry Brown rejected Plessy's reliance on the 13th Amendment, arguing it applied only to action


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to restore slavery. He likewise held that the Louisiana statute did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court sanctioned racial discrimination in the South by requiring all facilities to be both separate but equal. With the passage of very little time, the states of the Old Confederacy enacted laws restricting the use by black Americans of everything from the cradle to the grave: hospitals, theaters, hotels, restaurants, housing, drinking fountains, public parks and swimming pools, libraries and cemeteries. These separate but never equal facilities were integrated only after years of litigation representing the bitter opposition of the South -and often the North -- to desegregation. A good example took place in the nation's public schools. In fact, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) expressly overruled Plessy v. Ferguson. This 1954 case still stands as a landmark in the search for equal education.Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for a unanimous court, saying that separate but equal education was inherently unequal under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. A few years before the turn of the century, the United States had survived its own excesses, and class warfare surfaced again. Another financial panic occupied center stage in the 1890s, and the life of the urban poor deteriorated. Writers saw this class anger on the part of those dealing with the realities of ordinary life: the 12-hour day, unsafe, even dangerous conditions in the factories of America, the exploitation of immigrant workers, corporate resistance to labor unions, corruption in the cities, child labor, wages below the poverty level, and the continuing concentration of wealth in fewer hands. Theodore Dreiser was one of the writers who denounced the Catholic Church for its emphasis on materialism. The Church and Wealth in America was published in 1931, and those interested may download Chapter 14 of this book from the Internet. Dreiser was equally unsparing in his criticism of all religion and had no interest in missionaries. Dreiser was an eloquent spokesman for his beliefs which included support for the urban poor and black Americans. "Ministers," he wrote, "must be adherents of [a certain] faith and talk about whatever 'revealed' nonsense is ordained by said faith. And, should they talk otherwise, is not the corporation-financed American world certain to blacklist, denounce, and pursue them?" Sinclair Lewis was another social critic during the 1920s and 30s. His Babbitt was an example. George Babbitt was the quintessential small town businessman who tried life as a salesman, but finally returned to Zenith, Ohio, not because he longed to, but because it was all he could do. Lewis wrote prolifically, but he should be remembered for Elmer Gantry which showed that a minister can subvert religion, and Kingsblood Royal (1947) which showed how American society mistreated its black citizens. Upton Sinclair is frequently mistaken for Sinclair Lewis, probably because both were


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social critics. Upton Sinclair picketed the office of John D. Rockefeller to protest Rockefeller's sanctioning of the massacre of the Ludlow miners in 1913. Since Sinclair was the world-famous author of The Jungle, so he managed to hold the attention of the press. Rockefeller ended up making a public relations tour of the Ludlow site in Colorado to counter the adverse publicity. The owners of coal mines never overlooked an opportunity to bring about violence in their efforts to defeat unions; miner-inspired violence played well in the press. The Ludlow Masacre in Colorado at the Coloardo Fuel and Iron Company, a coal mine complex owned by Rockefeller interests, was an example. Sinclair turned the Ludlow violence into King Coal in 1917. Neither Sinclair, Lewis or Dreiser publicly supported admitting women into unions, though as a Socialist, Sinclair would be expected to do so. Resentment and anger surfaced directed against an economic system that was not functioning for working women in their lives of poverty and unsafe working conditions. On March 25, 1912 a fire swept the top three floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City. Ladders of the Fire Department could reach only to the seventh floor, so workers burned to death or jumped out windows to the streets and died. Exit doors were locked, so the employer could keep track of his employees. When the dust of this dreadful fire settled, about 146 workers had died. Most of them were women who were not protected by any union; the American Federation of Labor (AFL) refused to admit either blacks or women as members. In 1913, the women's movement was picking up political momentum; women wanted to vote. Some 5,000 women marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, while an estimated 500,000 spectators watched . Initially, some of those in the forefront of the suffragette movement were Socialists, like Emma Goldman. The Socialists had their own magazine, Socialist Women. It enlisted women in the cause so that by 1913, some 15 percent of the party's membership were women. Margaret Sanger, one of the pioneers in advocating birth control was also involved with the suffragettes. Women got the right to vote in 1920 with ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. However, it was not until 1937 that the Supreme Court upheld a minimum wage law for women. West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937). Because coal was essential to fuel the nation's plants, its workers were basically in the frontline of those organizations trying to create unions against the violent opposition of corporate owners to any union. The United Mineworkers of America was founded in Columbus, Ohio in 1890, according to its Home Page on the Internet. It came into existence via a merger of the Knights of Labor Trade Assembly No. 15 with the National Progressive Union of Miners and Mine Laborers. The constitution adopted by the delegates to the first UMWA convention barred discrimination based on race, religion, or national origin. The UMWA's founding fathers


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clearly recognized the destructive power of discrimination at a time when racism and ethnic discrimination were accepted facts in some parts of American culture. The following text is from the UMWA's Home Page description of the Latimer Massacre in 1897. "The anthracite miners of northeastern Pennsylvania were early members of the UMWA. In 1897, anthracite miners were faced with low wages, poor working conditions, and sporadic work. The miners struck to improve these conditions, but poor coal market conditions led coal operators to harden their opposition to the miners' demands. The companies decided on a show of force by their own company police and by the cooperative sheriff of Luzerne County, James Martin. On Labor Day, thousands of non-union miners who were UMWA supporters marched peacefully in the anthracite mining towns. In the following days, more marches occurred. Anxious to avoid violence, the UMWA leaders urged marchers not to carry even walking sticks, though American flags abounded. On September 10, the strikers masrched to Latimer and were stopped by a force led by Sheriff Martin. The unexpected halt led to confusion and jostling, and shots suddenly rang out. Nineteen of the miners were killed and perhaps fifty more were wounded, in what has become known as the Latimer Massacre. Although the violence was committed by the so-called forces of law and was needless -- the sheriff had dispersed larger, rowdier crowds alone in previous confrontations -- no one was convicted for murders at Latimer. The primary result of the massacre was rapid growth in unionism in the anthracite region. During the next four months approximately 15,000 new names were added to the UMWA rolls."

The Latimer Massacre was not the first such labor violence suppressed by the militias or other forces directed by the government, either state or national. Nor was it the last. In fact, labor did not get the right to form a union that might engage in collective bargaining until 1936, when Congress passed the Labor Management Relations Act. During the period between 1897 and 1935, labor and management clashed often and violently. In 1907, there was a financial panic and crisis. Industrial management had not yet figured out how to control costs. Henry Ford was manufacturing cars and paying workers the unheard of wage of $5 an hour. He could pay this princely sum, because he had created the assembly line where his Model T Fords could be assembled as they moved down a line. Workers added components such as doors, steering wheels and other essential parts as the chassis were moving along the assembly line. Charlie Chaplin's film, Modern Times, was a remarkable satire of this technological development known as mass production. Thirty years later, the stress of mass production under less than human conditions led to bloody strikes in Detroit and Flint, Michigan. Walter Reuther and his brother Victor were the leaders of these strikes that finally allowed them to Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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organize the United Automobile Workers (UAW), a union active today in auto and farm implement companies in 1996. The Panama Canal had been under construction since 1907 and finally opened on August 14, 1914, the year that war broke out in Europe. Today, the so-called Big Ditch, carries daily commercial cargo in about thirty ships. Even with a two-ocean Navy, military ships such as large carriers may still use the canal. Oil tankers represent about 23 percent of all canal traffic. President Jimmy Carter negotiated a treaty with Panama that required the United States to cede the canal to that country by 1999. Although the American Federation of Labor was founded in 1881, it consistently refused to admit women or black Americans. Samuel Gompers, then president of the AFL, said he did not want to interfere in the internal affairs of the South. W.E. B DuBois, a distinguished black writer and, according to some, a Socialist wrote in 1913: "The net result of all this [discrimination] has been to convince the American Negro that his greatest enemy is not the employer who robs him, but his fellow white workingman." See his book, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, it reprinted in 1991. According to Howard Zinn, the "well-paid leaders of the AFL were protected from criticism by tightly controlled meetings and 'goon' squads -- hired toughs originally used against strikebreakers but after a while used to intimidate and beat up opponents inside the union." Thus, in 1905 a large group of socialists, anarchists and radical trade unionists met in Chicago to form the International Workers of the World (IWW), also known as Wobblies. Bill Hayward was the leader, and Eugene Debs, an avowed Socialist, shared roles with Mother Jones, an organizer for the United Mine Workers of America. Their official pamphlets were inspired by the Lenin-Marx perspective that addressed class warfare. They claimed to be peaceful, but at a strike against U.S. Steel Corporation in 1909, shots were exchanged by the Wobblies and the Pennsylvania State Police. Throughout the long period it took for labor to organize effectively, opposition continued from corporate America, state and national governments. They were fearful of unions, but for different reasons. Corporations saw the threat to profit, but government wanted to muzzle unions in violation of the First Amendment. In many cities around the country, the City Council or its equivalent enacted ordinances forbidding union organizers to address the public. Many Wobblies went to jail rather than surrender a constitutional right to free speech, even though no court had ruled that speech directed to recruiting union members was protected. However, the court finally spoke out. Hague v. Congress of Industrial Organizations, 307 U.S. 496 (1939). This case involved the constitutionality of a Jersey City, New Jersey municipal ordinance


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requiring permits from the Director of Public Safety for the conduct of public meetings and for the distribution of printed material in streets, parks and other public places. Mayor Frank "I am the Law" Hague was using the ordinance particularly against labor unions. With support from the American Civil Liberties Union, the court agreed that an injunction was proper. It enjoined Hague's systematic denials of permits to address a public meeting. That case, however, was not decided until twenty-six years after the launching of the IWW, or Wobblies. At the time of the Ludlow Massacre, there was political turmoil. Only three years earlier, the National Association for Colored People (NAACP) was formed in 1910, prompted by a race riot in Springfield, Illinois. Woodrow Wilson, a racist, had been elected president in 1912, and women continued to agitate for the right to vote. Neither he nor his predecessors as president, Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt and William Howard Taft so much as lifted a hand to halt the lynchings of black Americans. These lynchings occurred at least twice a week or more in the South. Wilson himself had been president of Princeton, the only major northern university that refused to admit black Americans. Wilson used his power to segregate the federal government. He also appointed southern whites to offices traditionally reserved for blacks, and he vetoed a clause on racial equality in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The one occasion on which Wilson met with black American leaders ended in a fiasco as the president virtually threw the visitors out of his office. By any conservative definition, Wilson was a white supremacist. Wilson maintained a discreet silence about white terrorism in the South, and he provided what passed for scholarly research in the filming of The Birth of a Nation, possibly the worst ever example of historical revision by Hollywood. But this perversion of history was not released until 1915, a year after the Ludlow Massacre. On April 20, 1914 twenty men, women and children were slaughtered by a combination of Colorado militia, coal company guards, and thugs hired as private detectives and strikebreakers. A few days earlier, miners at the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company had gone out on strike. The miners and their families were immediately evicted from the company-owned houses and set up a tent city on public property. The Baldwin Felts Detective Agency had been hired to suppress the strike. This agency brought with it an armored car mounted with a machine gun. The suppression was well-planned. Kerosene had been poured over the tents to set them ablaze at the right time. The miners had dug foxholes in the tents, so women and children might avoid the random use of guns in the hands of thugs. On the day of the massacre -- April 20 -- miners were celebrating the Greek Easter. At 10 A.M., the militia ringing the tent city opened fire on orders of Lt. Karl E. Lindenfelter. Women and children who died in this slaughter, either from bullets or fire set to burn the tents,


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were found huddled at the bottoms of their tents. Not one man who committed cold-blooded murder was ever prosecuted, but many miners and their leaders were arrested and blackballed from the coal industry. These details came from the Home Page of the UMWA via the Internet. The Internet also described the gunfight at Matewan, a village in West Virginia. "In the spring of early 1920, unorganized coal miners in Mingo, County began seeking to join the UMWA. The coal operators became alarmned by the organizing activity and locked out the miners. On May 12, 1920, twelve men were killed at Matewan, West Virginia in a gun fight in which the local police and the people of Matewan faced a group of hoodlums hired by the infamous Baldwin Felts Detective Agency at the behest of the coal operators to unlawfully evict miners from the homes. In the Matewan battle, Albert Felts wearing a badge as a 'deputy sheriff' of Harlan County, Kentucky fired the first shot but was killed by Matewan Chief of Police Sid Hatfield. Hatfield had warned the thugs that they had no legal warrants to evict the citizens of Matewan and that he would not permit evictions without proper legal procedures. Felts then forcibly attempted to arrest the Chief of Police. Felts had been one of the chief gunmen used by the coal operators in the Ludlow, Colorado Massacre in 1914, in which twenty persons were killed, including twelve women and children who were burned alive in their tents. Sid Hatfield, a hero to West Virginia miners, was himself killed in August, 1921 in Welch, West Virginia by C. E. Lively, a Baldwin Felts gunman. Hatfield's murder was in all likelihood a setup. He was arrested on July 28 on an allegation that he had shot up the town of Mohawk more than a year earlier. He was taken from his home in Matewan to McDowell County, West Virginia, a stronghold of antiUMWA coal operators. As he entered the court house with Ed Chambers, who had been called as a witness, both were shot down in front of their wives by Lively and two other gunmen. No charges were ever brought against Lively or the other murderers."

Violent strikes were to continue into the 1930s, and no real labormanagement peace would occur until the National Labor Relations Act was enacted by Congress in 1936. During the entire period from about 1869 to 1920, women struggled to get the right to vote and even be admitted to graduate schools. It was in 1869 that Susan B. Anthony and a number of other women formed the National Women's Suffrage Association. For the most part, women saw their universal suffrage demands moved in parallel with those demands of abolitionists in the days before the Civil War. In 1873, the association launched a test case in which the Supreme Court held that Myra Bradwell could not be admitted to the practice of law, because she was a women. Bradwell v. Illinois, 83 U.S. 130 (1873). A separate concurring opinion of Justice Bradley absolutely infuriated women. Bradley observed "a wide difference in the respective sphere and destinies of women and men." He continued, saying that "the natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life....the Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the Law of the Creator." In the early years of the twentieth century, there was a spreading concern about the health and safety of women in the workplace. Activists allied with the suffragettes pressed for state laws to upgrade the status of women who were rapidly entering the workplace. In 1908, the Supreme Court decided that a 10-hour day for women was enough and beyond that, working was dangerous to their health. Muller v. Oregon, 208 U.S. 412 (1908). Louis D. Brandeis, later to become a justice of the Supreme Court, submitted the brief in this case; it had 110 pages of sociological data taken from European studies showing the negative effect on women of long hours of work on women's reproductive health. Then, a state court had held that a minimum wage law for women was constitutional, and the Supreme Court voted 4 to 4 on this case, Brandeis abstaining, thus upholding the constitutionality of the Oregon law. Stettler v. O'Hara, 243 U.S. 629 (1917). Finally, Congress approved and enough states ratified the 19th Amendment in 1920. It read in part: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." Susan B. Anthony had written the very same language in a proposed amendment in 1878. Nevertheless, women's rights were set back by decisions of the Supreme Court. However, Congress felt that social changes following World War I required women to participate in the political process by voting. Before entering World War I in 1917, it seems appropriate to mention a film that so revised and perverted history that it deserves comment. The power even then -- 1914 -- of Hollywood's foray into historical filming was a product so dreadfullly racist it stands as a monument to falsity. The film, The Birth of a Nation, was based on a novel by Thomas Dixon. Jr., The Clansmen. Produced by D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation was seen by some two hundred million people between 1915 and 1946 in the United States and overseas, where it scored particularly impressive triumphs in Germany and South Africa, according the Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies. One of its editors, Leon F. Litwack described The Birth of a Nation: From the very outset, this film mesmerized and misled Americans, revealing the extraordinary power of the cinema to "teach" history and to reflect and shape popular attitudes and stereotypes. Earlier public entertainment -- such as minstrel shows, "coon" songs, and vaudeville -- depicted blacks as clowns and buffoons, essentially passive objects.The Birth of a Nation, however, introduced still another dimension: The grinning and obsequious demeanor of black men often masks a vicious bestiality, at no time more vividly manifested after emancipation. The film is based on The Clansmen, a novel by Thomas Dixon, Jr., a native of North Carolina and popular Baptist preacher who


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wanted to awaken the American people to the nature of the Black Peril. To Dixon, this was a national problem. The presence of the Negro, North and South, endangered American civilization and the sanctity of white womanhood, and it posed as great a threat in 1900 as it did in 1868. "There is enough negro blood here," a Dixon character warns, "to make mulatto the whole Republic." That obsession consumed Dixon, and the film -- true to its intentions -- plays on the presumed primitve sexuality of the subhuman black man and its implications for the survival of the Anglo-Saxon race. The image is driven home in imagery no audience could easily forget. Before riding off to redeem the white South, klansmen dip their emblem into the blood of a blonde white virgin who has been terrorized by a black brute.

This is the film shown by the request of President Woodrow Wilson at theWhite House in 1914. Three years later the United States entered a war in Europe that Wilson said would make the world safe for democracy. After the command showing, Wilson reportedly said: "My only regret is that it [the film] is all so terribly true."

Europe, with its complex alliances and geography where boundaries changed frequently before, during and after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, was the setting for World War I. Between 1792 and 1815, the major powers of Europe were Great Britain, France, Austria, Tsarist Russia, Prussia with its many principalities, and Hungary. Poland and Italy were the victims of the many wars fought by these major powers. Spain was a major player in Europe, but its boundaries on the Mediterranean and the Pyrenees protected it from invasion. However, Spanish troops had occupied the Netherlands and Belgium at one time or another and had to convey them to some other power, usually after a defeat. In this immensely complicated disposition of power and changing geography, Prince Clemens Lothar Metternich was named Foreign Minister of Austria in 1808. For various reasons not relevant in 1995, Prussia had to declare war on Napoleonic France in 1813, and Metternich saw the opportunity to salvage some political advantage for Austria by acting as mediator in this war. Napoleon, devastated by his defeat at the hands of Russia and his retreat from Moscow during a cruel winter, reluctantly rejected Metternich's peace proposal; Napoleon knew it meant defeat. So Austria joined the alliance against France. And Napoleon was finally defeated in France and exiled to the island of Elba. Napoleon


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escaped and returned to lead French troops that finally lost at Waterloo on June 20, 1815 just before the meeting arranged by Metternich. This momentous meeting, known as the Concert of Vienna, brought peace to Europe for almost one hundred years. World War I began in 1914. Prince Metternich was a pragmatist. Rather than deal with nationalism, he simply ignored it. For example, he treated Italy as a geographic concept without any attention to the fact it was, among other factors, united by a common language. At the heart of the Concert of Vienna was the German Confederation created just before the Congress -- the many sovereign states present at the Concert of Vienna -- adjourned. The German Confederation was actually a union of sovereign states, not a federal government. Each of its thirty-nine member states had one vote, and several states each had a one-half vote. This would lead eventually to dissolution, but not before some serious problems surfaced. For the Austrian territories, membership in the German Confederation was based on historic, not ethnic considerations. Thus, the alliance function of the German Confederation did not extend to Hungary, Poland, or the principalities of Lombardy or Venice in Italy. Accordingly, Austria might become involved in a war with Russia over Polish territory, and with France over Italian territories without any guarantee of support from the German Confederation. In such a war, part of a national group -Italians or Poles -- might have to fight in the service of the Confederation and part might have to fight against it. Metternich had to ignore nationalism, not fight it to get what was a fatal flaw incorporated into the Concert of Vienna. Trying to deal with nationalism at the time might have brought the disaster that finally occurred. In fact, Metternich's brilliantly conceived Concert of Europe began unraveling in 1852. One of the central problems was the diversity of Austria-Hungary. It had large minority groups within its boundaries, all intensely nationalistic. These included the Czechs, Slovaks, Croats and Serbs, Poles, Rumanians, and Ukrainians, while the Hungarians were in the majority. In fact, at one time the Habsburgs decreed that German was to be the official language. Czech, for example, almost became a dead language, and was resurrected by Czech linguists in the late nineteenth Century. Metternich's belief in the balance of power might not have ended in war, as it did, even though they were really local wars of independence. However, he prevailed on Tsar Alexander I not to intervene openly on behalf of the struggle for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1821-30. Great Britain and Russia agreed in 1826 to divide the eastern Mediterranean into spheres of influence. Thus, with British support, Greece declared its independence in 1830. About this time Prince Metternich had to decide whether to support Russian intervention in


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France or recognize the lesser evil of the French revolution. It produced the Orléans regime of Louis Philippe replacing the Bourbon monarchy. He chose the latter rather than dealing with the consequences of Russian troops marching through Germany to subdue France. Then, there were uprisings in Italy that required Austrian intervention. Finally, Austria's dominance began its slide with its loss of the German and Italian positions. Both of these occurred because of a break with Russia brought about by the Crimean War in 1854. A year earlier, Russia had gone to war with Turkey by attempting military moves to double the length of the common frontier between Austria and Russia, a maneuver unacceptable to France and Great Britain. When Russian forces moved across the Danube River, France and Great Britain declared war on Russia. It was seen as a move which would give Russia a role in controlling the Dardenelles ruled by Turkey. In September, 1854 British and French troops began the siege of Sebastopol, and Russian casualties were over 100,000 in all. The British did not fare well at Gallipoli. The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred Lord Tennyson memorialized this gallant and tragic effort. In that year, after many conspiracies, coups, and counter-coups, Napoleon III was declared Emperor of France defeating the republicans in a popular election. However, the constitution of the republic was scrapped in the process. For the next sixteen years, Napoleon engaged in adventurism in Poland and Mexico. In 1866, Austria fought Prussia and was routed in the Battle of Königgrätz in 1866, reducing Austria to a second rate European power. Then, in 1870 Napoleon III tried appeasing Count Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of Germany and a Prussian. This misbegotten policy led to the Franco-German War of that year, and German troops marched into Paris. France lost Alsace-Lorraine as a result of this German invasion. This French defeat made it clear that Germany was the only genuine ally of Austria, and France was no longer a feasible ally of the Hapsburg Empire. Emperor Franz Josef only slowly grasped the significance of this military calculus and began looking at expansion in the Balkans. This meant potential conflicts with Turkey, and a new source of friction with Russia. Tsar Alexander had made it clear on several occasions that the warring nationalities of the Balkans, Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins, and Bosnians was a matter of special concern to Russia. This combination eventually led to the outbreak of World War I. Approaching the 20th Century, Europe was a continent still undergoing change and turmoil, but with both Germany united by Bismarck and Italy united by Guiseppe Garibaldi. In 1867, Great Britain's Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli presided over the opening of the Suez Canal, a new route to the Far East and the British Empire with oil not yet discovered in any quantities in the Middle


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East. Nonetheless, Great Britain had staked out its sphere of interest at the northern point of the Persian Gulf. Martin Gilbert's Atlas of World War I was published by the Oxford University Press in 1994. This book has extensive maps with the positions of each country, the extent of its armed forces, and many other details of interest to the war historian. The British Empire had worldwide scope in 1914. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were members of the British Commonwealth, and a royal presence in India with a Viceroy. In the Middle East, Aden, Oman, Bahrain, and what is now Kuwait were either ruled or controlled by Great Britain. In Africa, its empire included Egypt, Sudan, British Somaliland, Rhodesia, and the Union of South Africa. Britain also ruled Cyprus and Malta. The French Empire in Africa included all the Mediterranean shore territory from Gibraltar to the boundary with Egypt, French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, Sierra Leone, and Madagascar. The German colonies in Africa included the Cameroons, German Southwest Africa, and German East Africa. Belgium ruled the Belgian Congo, King Leopold II having slyly conspired to acquire what forty years later was found to contain a great deal of the world's uranium. The Turkish Ottoman Empire began with European Turkey and across the Dardenelles all the way around the Eastern Mediterranean shore in land that later became Lebanon, Syria, and Israel down the shoreline of the Red Sea to Yemen and from the boundary with Bahrain north through what is now Iraq and Armenia. By 1914, Germany had just about completed the Berlin-Baghdad railroad in an effort to extend its commercial interests. By 1914, Great Britain and Russia had signed a convention settling outstanding differences in Central Asia and dividing Persia (now Iran) into spheres of influence. Great Britain controlled the oilfields in what is now southern Iraq, beginning with the Persian Gulf. Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany was a grandson of Britain's Queen Victoria, and in 1910 he visited London for the funeral of King Edward VII. Nine kings rode horses three by three out of Bukingham Palace. Barbara Tuchman wrote in her Guns of August that "the muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cort”ge left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a blaze of splendour never to be seen again." The future source of tragedy, tall, corpulent and corseted, with green plumes waving from his helmet, Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the old Emperor was in the parade leaving Buchingham Palace. Franz Josef rode on the right of Belgium's King Albert. By 1914, Europe was a seething mass of minorities all wanting their independence. Capital cities like Berlin, Paris, Rome, Budapest, Vienna,


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Moscow, Belgrade, and London had more than the European share of vain generals, ambitious diplomats and incompetent politicians. All that was needed to launch a war was a single spark. On July 12, 1914 a Serbian anarchist named Princip supplied that spark by assassinating Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo.Within weeks, mobilization occurred following rejections of ultimatums that were merely empty formalities. The armies of Germany and France were on a collision course. Italy did not declare war until 1915; it had not been notified of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia in violation of its treaty with Austria. Following the Schlieffeln Plan designed by a Prussian in 1907, Germany attacked Belgium and Luxembourg on the route to Paris.

Railway Gun Men of the 80th Division fire a railway gun at German positions, at Meuse, France, in September, 1918.

In the first battle of the Marne (1914) the British and French forces succeeded in blocking the German advance. Each side had 500,000 casualties. However, the German armies advanced within twenty-three miles of Paris. With that failure, what might have been a six weeks victory was turned into a four year war in which 5.2 million of the Allied Powers were counted as War Dead. In 1995, Phillip Warner's book, World War One: A Chronological Narrative, was published. In it, Warner gives the horrifying nature of the war and the casualties (dead and wounded) of the many battles fought between 1914 and 1918. American casualties were about 265,500 for the period they were in action with almost two full-scale armies. The Central Powers -- Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Turkey -lost 3.5 million, but the nature of the trench warfare was so terrible, that with respect to Russia and Turkey, the figures are only conjectural. No accurate figures exist. Some twenty million died of hunger and disease related to the war. Not one person has ever been able to show that the war brought any gain for humanity. The rhetoric of American Socialists that it was an imperialist war alienated many people. The countries of Europe were fighting over boundaries, colonies, and spheres of influence; they were fighting for the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East.


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Trench Warfare in WWI British officer leads a raiding party to harass the German lines.

In Washington, Woodrow Wilson campaigned for reelection in 1916 on the promise that "he kept us out of war." Barely three months after his inauguration in 1917, the United States was sending troops to Europe. German submarines attacked shipping carrying arms to Britain. Wilson believed in freedom of the seas. However, Wilson had an overriding interest in trade. Gradually, trade shifted from Germany and Italy to England and France. By the end of the war, Europe's reserves of gold had virtually disappeared winding up in the United States. In April, the United States declared war on the Central Powers, Germany, Hungary and Austria. Congress approved budgets that allowed the rapid mobilization and outfitting with weapons over 3 million men, of which about 1.3 million actually went to Europe. General John Pershing commanded these troops which tipped the balance in favor of the Allied Powers. On November 11, 1918 Germany surrendered. The war had not been universally approved by Americans, many of whom were recent immigrants and had relatives in Germany, or were politically opposed. In fact, Congress enacted a Selective Service Act when only 75,000 volunteers had responded to the call to arms. George Creel, a veteran newsman, was made director of the Committee on Public Information. Its function was to whip up enthusiasm for the war. It did so by sending thousands of speakers to organized rallies, where each gave a five-minute canned pep talk. At President Wilson's request, Congress enacted the Espionage Act in June, 1917. This outrageous law made it a crime to criticize the government for its conduct of the war. One month after passage of the Espionage Act, the Postmaster General ordered a magazine, The Masses, suppressed. This monthly magazine described itself as "a monthly revolutionary journal." The Postmaster General said that some articles and political cartoons in the issue of August, 1917, attacking the war and the military draft would violate the act. Judge Learned Hand enjoined the Postmaster General from acting against the magazine by invoking the First Amendment's guarantee of press freedom. He was reversed on appeal to the Court of Appeals. Masses Publishing Company v. Patten, Postmaster General, 246 F. 24 (2nd Cir. 1917). The Germans surrendered in 1918, but Tsarist Russia was on the verge of becoming the Soviet Union. V. I. Lenin, the leading theoretician of the Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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new ideology of Communism was relentless in applying its principles, ordered the execution of the Russian royal family. Leon Trotsky later had a disagreement with Lenin that led to his departure to Mexico, and Stalin established a Soviet Union that was to continue until its collapse in 1989. Assassins paid by Stalin finally tracked Trotsky in Mexico and killed him in 1930. The Allied Powers, in fact, continued their war against the Bolsheviks until 1919, when the anti-Bolshevik forces withdrew. They included British, American, and Italian troops entering Bolshevik territory from Archangel in the very north of Russia. Poland continued its war against Russia which had partitioned Poland years earlier. Polish troops defeated Russian forces at the Vistula River. Poland regained some of its old territory from Russia pursuant to the Treaty of Riga in 1920 and seized some land from Lithuania in the same year. All the Allied Powers gathered in Paris to consider what was finally known as the Treaty of Versailles. This treaty redrew the map of Europe, creating states like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia dismembering the Austria-Hungarian Empire in the process. Additionally, the Turkish Ottoman Empire was dismembered, and the diplomats created new states such as Lebanon and Syria. Palestine became a British Mandate ruled in accordance with the League of Nations also created by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Unfortunately, the Senate of the United States declined to ratify this treaty when Senator Cabot Lodge, a Republican, worked against it, describing it as internationalist. Accordingly, the United States never joined the League of Nations. Among other things, the Allied nations demanded that Germany pay them reparations for war damages. Articles 231 to 236 of the Treaty of Versailles covered the amount and the timing for these payments. Article 235 states: In order to enable the Allied and Associated Powers to proceed at once in the restoration of their industrial and economic life, pending the full determination of their claims, Germany shall pay in such installments and in such manner (whether in gold, commodities, ships, securities or other wise) as the Reparation Commission may fix, during 1919, 1920 and the first four months of 1921, the equivalent of 20,000,000,000 gold marks. Out of this sum the expenses of the armies of occupation subsequent to the Armistice of November 11, 1918, shall first be met, and such supplies of food and raw materials as may be judged by the Governments of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers to be essential to enable Germany to meet her obligations for reparations may also, with the approval of the said Governments, to be paid for out of the above sum. The balance shall be reckoned towards the liquidation of the amounts due for reparation.


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The 20 billion gold marks was only the beginning of reparations from Germany. The Allied and Associated governments were looking at a total of 269 billion gold marks. Notwithstanding these harsh demands, some Germans saw the need to establish a working government to replace the Prussian edifice that collapsed with the surrender of Germany and the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II. He had taken refuge in Holland. Thus on August 11, 1919 the Constitution of the Weimar Republic was proclaimed. Friedrich Ebert was its first Chancellor. Ebert inherited some postwar problems. The German navy had a mutiny at Kiel, and the Spartacists (Communists) formed worker and soldier councils. Between January 5 and 12, 1919, there was a general strike and Spartacist uprising in Berlin. The Spartacus League was founded by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht and developed as an offshoot of the more moderate Social Democratic Party. Its members accepted the Bolshevik Revolution and saw in the unstable post World War I political climate an opportunity to energize the international proletarian revolution. It was not peaceful. There was fighting in the Ruhr and central Germany, and a Soviet Republic formed in Munich. It was crushed by Prussian and German Freikorps forces. In early 1920, the German Workers Party held its first meeting where Adolf Hitler announced the party program. The Communists initiated further uprisings in central Germany, and their Red Army was defeated by the Reichswehr. In 1921, Hitler became the first chairman of the National Socialist Workers' Party, later shortened to the Nazi Party. In the same year, the SA (Sturmabteilung -- Brown Shirts) were established. Perhaps worst of all, the value of the Gerrman mark began its precipitous decline. By September 3, 1923 a ticket on a Berlin streetcar cost 400,000 marks. By October, 4 billion marks was equal to one dollar. Only the wealthy survived this ruinous inflation, and the people began to listen to Adolf Hitler. Only issuance of the Rentenmark with a value of 4.2 marks to the dollar finally stabilized the economy, but the damage had been done. On November 8, 1923 the so-called Beer Hall Putsch led by Hitler took place in Munich, while Communists attempted to seize power in Hamburg. There were separatist movements in the Rhineland. Hitler was released from prison after serving nine months of his sentence for participating in the Beer Hall Putsch. In early 1924, the Nazi Party was reestablished, and General Field Marshall Paul von Hindenberg was elected president of the Weimar Republic. In November, 1925 the Nazi paramilitary organization, the SS (Schutzstaffel -- Black Shirts) was formed, and the first volume of Hitler's Mein Kampf was published. Hardly anyone outside Germany paid any attention to this book, but, in it, Hitler told the world just what he was going to do and finally did, by


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attacking Poland in 1939, thus launching World War II. In 1933, however, Dachau 2 concentration camp was opened, the first of many such camps used to imprison Jews while awaiting execution during the war. In March, the Reichstag, the German parliament enacted Enabling Laws making Hitler a dictator, and burning of "Un-German" books by Nazi students began. Some writers like Thomas Mann had tried in vain to appeal to moderates. In his book, The German Republic, Mann had endorsed the idea of a republic. In October, 1930 he issued an "Appeal to Reason," at a meeting in Berlin. Only police protection prevented the Nazis from turning the meeting into a brawl. A year later, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann's brother warned that were Hitler not stopped blood was sure to flow. Lion Feuchtwanger concluded in 1931 that the battle against Nazism was all but lost. Berlin, he wrote was "a city full of future emigrés," meaning Jews. One of them was Margot Jacoby, the wealthy wife of a successful patent lawyer in Berlin. She sent her husband and son to Palestine in 1936, saying "there was no other way." She was one of those appearing in Studs Terkel's great book, Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who Lived It. Here is what she said about herself: I left [penniless] in 1938, just a few days before "Crystal Night," when they [the Nazis] destroyed all the property of the Jews. A Swiss banker friend of mine said, 'When are you leaving?' I said 'Maybe in a month.' He said, 'No, you are leaving the day after tomorrow.' Outside of Germany, people knew better than we in Germany."

Some German writers were published in the United States. Alfred Knopf, for example, made it a practice for him and his wife, Blanche to spend enough time in Germany or other parts of Europe to sign up promising authors. In 1926, this husband-wife team agreed to publish Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Viking found Stefan Zweig in Germany, where he was a pacifist. Zweig wrote seven books, of which The World of Yesterday is perhaps the best known in the United States. Bertolt Brecht was widely known in Europe, and Alfred Knopf was enthusiastic about Brecht who, with Kurt Weill, wrote The Threepenny Opera in 1928. His Bertolt Brecht Journals of 1993 was a sensation among scholars because of its candid comments about his life, colleagues, friends, literature, and politics. The America of the 1920s was not scarred by the Great War that ended for Americans on November 11, 1918. The return of its soldiers was welcomed by a paper-strewn parade up Fifth Avenue. The Jazz Age was off and running, even before the war ended. The 1920s was also a period of prolific new writers who had "experienced" war and could do so with a new dimension. There were publishers who saw the potential and opened


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for business. Simon & Schuster opened their doors in 1923, but its first product was not really a book, but the first Cross Word Puzzle Book in 1924. Its sales plus the sales of dictionaries geared to the puzzle put Simon & Schuster in the black quickly. Charles Scribner & Company was one of the post-Civil War publishers and G. P. Putnam was one of the pioneers. American publishers opened offices in London, and British publishers followed suit but for different reasons. The Americans were in London to find European authors, while UK publishers like the Oxford University Press and Macmillans were in New York for the business available and the profits to be made. After the Civil War and the end of American expansion westward, people began reading even more than ever, probably because of the growth of public libraries.But censorship was a problem for publishers. Anthony Comstock was a self-appointed arbiter of literary excellence without the intelligence to support his status. However, he met his match in George Bernard Shaw. In 1905, Man and Superman was taken off the general circulation shelves of the New York Public Library and placed in the reserve section. When Shaw heard about this he described "Comstockery" in a published letter as the world's standing joke. It confirmed for Europe the deep-seated conviction that America is a provincial place. Comstock retaliated by suggesting that the police ban the opening of Shaw's play, Mrs. Warren's Profession. A court held the play was not actionable in a court, and it opened to crowds so large that police reserves had to be called out. Even today in 1995, some librarians have surrendered to the stupid by withdrawing Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn from classrooms and libraries. While Europe had been devastated by four years of war against the Central Powers, America was all but exempted from its economic consequences. Republican Warren G. Harding occupied the White House beginning in 1921. Scandals would turn up in his administration, and the press reported them, particularly the Teapot Dome scandal. It resulted in Harding's Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall imprisonment. Politics, however, played a small role in the years from 1920 to 1928. Culture drove America during this period, and New York was as Dorothy Parker said, an "Arrangement in Black and White." This city had been a mecca to the hundreds of thousands of black Americans emigrating from South to North in the years after Reconstruction right up to the Great War in Europe. W.E.B. Du Bois said they brought with them "their gift of story and song." No other city in America during the 1920s was as receptive to black talent as New York. As Ann Douglas wrote in her book, Terrible Honesty, uptown Manhattan became Harlem and produced the cultural and literary movement called the Harlem Renaissance, celebrated by whites and blacks alike. Postwar America had other problems. The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1920, and the country was officially dry. Congress passed the Volstead Act over Wilson's veto, and


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any beverage containing more than .5 percent alcohol effectively banned beer and wine. On the surface, New York was dry, since Frances Willard had lobbied nationally for abstinence. Prohibition was worse. It devastated the previously legal liquor business, the seventh largest industry in the country. The industry, however, never missed a beat. It sold its whiskey as medically necessary, and all a thirsty person had to do was find a friendly doctor to prescribe it. The Eighteenth Amendment also prohibited the importation of liquor. In short order, smugglers replaced ships that offloaded liquor outside the three-mile limit off the shores of New York and New Jersey to speed boats capable of outrunning the Coast Guard. The operation of speakeasies was a growing business, and one could discreetly order any sort of drink in the better clubs of New York. The '21 Club' was perhaps the best known of these clubs. Canada was a great supplier of liquor to the thirsty of America; its border was a sieve for smugglers. The truly ingenuous made "bathtub gin," said to be of poor quality by those who sampled it. For those fortunate enough to have anticipated Prohibition, the rewards could be worth something, the pleasure of sipping wine denied to others, or even sharing it with friends. Street v. Lincoln Safe Deposit Co.et al, 254 U.S. 88 (1920). Street proved he had lawfully acquired wine and liquor and stored it in the defendant warehouse as a lessee, all before the effective date of the Volstead Act. Street alleged that the wine and liquor stored by him were "in his exclusive possession and control and were intended to be and were used only for personal consumption by plaintiff and members of his family or bona fide guests." The Internal Revenue Service was charged with enforcement of the Volstead Act and wanted to confiscate the wine and liquor as "a threat to plaintiff." The Supreme Court held the Volstead Act enacted pursuant to the Eighteenth Amendment did not apply to the warehousing of lawfully acquired wine and liquor. In effect, the court suggested that he enjoy what he had lawfully acquired. The decade of the 1920s got off to a good start. Fiorella LaGuardia was a prominent New York City politician who served several terms in the House of Representatives. He was an outspoken critic of Prohibition. In hearings before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. LaGuardia testified against continuing Prohibition. "It is my calculation," he said, "that at least a million dollars a day is paid in graft and corruption to Federal, State, and local officers. Such a condition is not only intolerable, but it is demoralizing and dangerous to organized government. The Government even goes to the trouble of facilitating the financing end of the bootlegging industry. In 1925, $286, 950,000 more of $10,000 bills were issued than in 1920, and $25,000,000 more of $5000 bills were


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issued. What honest business man deals in $10,000 bills? Surely, these bills were not used to pay the salaries of ministers. The bootlegging industry has created a demand for bills of large denominations, and the Treasury Department accommodates them." For a while, Jimmy Walker was Mayor of New York and probably got political support from the Tammany Hall political machine. Walker was very good with the quick quip. When a delegation of Swiss admirers presented Walker with a 500-pound cheese at City Hall, he thanked them and asked, "Will someone run out and get me a cracker." New Yorkers loved Walker, even with some of his shortcomings. New York also offered the country's biggest circulation tabloid, the Daily News, with a circulation of about a million daily. The Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild were founded in 1923 and 1926 respectively. Both were dedicated to marketing bestsellers to their members. Some of its publishers included Farrar Strauss Giroux, the Harper Brothers later Harper & Row, and now HarperCollins, Doubleday Publishing Company and Scribner's. Random House was not founded until 1933. New Yorkers had their magazines, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker. Time Magazine, founded by Henry Luce and a colleague was published in New York first in 1923 and is still in business. New York was the nation's music capital in the 1920s, primarily because of the sales of sheet music. This was later the foundation of the nascent recording business centered in Manhattan. The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) began operations in 1926. The theater flourished as did the nightclubs. Dwight Deere Wiman was one of the early producers, coming out with The Little Shows and later, musicals with artists like Ray Bolger and Vera Zorina, a lovely ballerina, in "On Your Toes." Some of the great composers got their start in New York. George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Lorenz Hart and Eugene O'Neill, a playwright, were all in New York. Other luminaries included Alexander Woollcott, Duke Ellington, Bix Beiderbecke, James Thurber, Al Jolson, Langston Hughes, Ethel Waters, Babe Ruth, Damon Runyon, Walter Winchell, Walter Lippman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe. These names were widely familiar in America. They created a culture which was then exported it to the rest of the country. They include stars of the theater, music, books, poetry, actors and actresses on the stage, musicians, playwrights, and architects, and newspaper columnists like Walter Lippman and Franklin P. Adams (FPA).


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Carnegie Hall New York City

Conductors come and go, but Walter Damrosch stayed in New York as conductor of the New York Philharmonic. On Saturdays, at the old Carnegie Hall he would summon the entire orchestra to perform for children, usually brought in struggling and kicking by their parents. When Damrosch waved his baton imperiously, the music stopped with one gesture. He would then turn around and tell the children all about what they had just heard. Children loved it, and as adults probably loved Leonard Bernstein.

Dr. Walter Damrosch Conducting the New York Philharmonic playing Brahms Symphony No. 2. on the NBC Music Appreciation Hour

For residents of New York who needed a rest from its cultural merryground, the years between 1923 and 1931 saw the construction of the Bronx River Parkway, the Hutchinson River Parkway, the Saw Mill River Parkway, and the Cross Country Parkway. The Holland Tunnel was completed in 1927, and the George Washington Bridge was opened in 1931. New York probably had the first of the modern skyscrapers. The Chrysler and Empire State Buildings were completed in 1929. Robert Moses took over later parkway and bridge construction much to the dismay of some. He was an autocrat with power to build. Lewis Mumford, an urban planner par excellence lived in New York, but even Mumford could not convince Moses to be moderate. Mumford is the author of some 25 books, including The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, & Its Prospects published in 1968 by Harcourt Brace & Company. Immediately after World War I and the early 1920s the publishing community was centered in New York City. Simon & Schuster, for example, was organized in 1923, and other publishers were preoccupied with survival. For that reason alone, the publishers did not respond Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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collectively to the Red Scare, although individual editors may have done so. The newspapers, however, carried stories of Communism in Europe, particularly in postwar Germany. The war ended in 1918, but Congress and the courts read the stories of the breakdown of German order with Communist uprisings in many German cities, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and creation of the Communist International to operate around the world. All this fear led to the Red Scare of 1919-23. President Wilson's Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, scoured the country for subversive aliens, and Palmer personally led some raids in New York City. The State Legislature tried to expel from its ranks duly elected Socialists. These members of the legislature were successfully defended by Charles Evans Hughes, who in 1930 would become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Gitlow v. New York, 168 U.S. 652 (1925) was a setback for civil liberties. Gitlow was convicted for violation of the Espionage Act. He had written and circulated some 16,000 pamphlets urging strikes and class action in any form. Clarence Darrow defended Gitlow, arguing that his client had only urged abstract doctrine and that this was protected by the First Amendment. Justice Sanford wrote for the majority, saying that "A state may punish utterances endangering the foundations of organized government and threatening its overthrow by unlawful means." Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes dissented. "The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result. Eloquence may set fire to reason. But whatever may be thought of the redundant discourse before us, it had no chance of starting a present conflagration." Thus did Holmes limit the clear and present danger rationale in the Schenck case. Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919). However, it was not until Stromberg v. California, 283 U.S. 359 (1931) that the court actually ruled a state law unconstitutional on constitutional free speech grounds. The freedom to criticize press comments exposing crime and other corrupt conduct was upheld in Near v. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 797 (1931). However briefly the period of fear of Communism lasted, it was replaced with the Great Depression and the poverty created throughout America in 1929. The 1920s may have begun on a note favoring the consumption of wine, but it also opened on a threat to liberty and capital punishment for political syndicalism. In the spring of 1920, a typesetter and anarchist named Andrea Salsedo was arrested in New York City and held without counsel for eight weeks. This was a violation of the 5th Amendment. Salsedo was denied counsel during his incarceration without any charge. He was not allowed to contact his family or a lawyer. His crushed body was found on the street fourteen floors from where the FBI was holding him. The FBI said he had committed suicide. Two friends of Salsedo


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began carrying guns fearful of the same fate as Salsedo. They were arrested in Brockton, Massachusetts and charged with armed robbery and murder that had taken place in a shoe factory. Nicola Sacco and Bartelemeo Vanzetti went on trial, were convicted, and spent seven years in prison while appeals went on, and while people all over the country became involved in their case. The pair had been ably defended by a Massachusetts lawyer named Thompson. He had argued to the trial judge that these men were being sentenced to death because they were anarchists and foreigners. Actually, there was evidence presented that Vanzetti was insane at the time of the crime. Commonwealth v. Sacco and Vanzetti, 255 Mass. 369, 151 N.E. 839 (1926). However, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts held that the Superior Court had no jurisdiction to grant a new trial because the motion was not timely. Both defendants were electrocuted in August, 1927. Two years later, Black Friday, October 24, 1929 signalled the end of one era and the beginning of another. The Great Depression had begun with the precipitous decline of the Dow-Jones averages for 65 stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange which listed the stock of about 1,200 companies then. Excessive credit, not enough margin requirements, and the effects of high tariff protectionism had made their contribution to this financial débacle. In 1923, a Republican Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, had recommended a huge tax cut. Against stiff opposition the tax cut was enacted. In 1928, New York's Mayor LaGuardia toured the poorer districts of the city and said: "I was not prepared for what I actually saw. It seemed almost incredible that such conditions of poverty really exist." This tour of the Mayor's took place when Ann Douglas's New York was throbbing with cultural activity. In her book, Terribly Honest, she observed: "Imports [during 1918] dropped dramatically, but the economy, stimulated by the demands of foreign nations at war, filled its own needs effortlessly. This imbalance between American and European accounts was one of the precipitating causes of the Crash of 1929, and it persisted long after the Depression was over."

The New York Stock Exchange

Herbert Hoover, a Republican, was president from 1928 to 1933. He was unfairly blamed for the Great Depression. Unfortunately, he kept telling the public that "Prosperity was just around the corner," a claim that exposed Hoover to ridicule as the economy got worse. Kenneth Galbraith Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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had a different view. He said in his book The Great Crash, that behind the excessive speculation was the fact that "the economy was essentially unsound." He also said there was a "bad distribution of income." This condition has become even worse in 1995, and more people are aware of this unequal distribution of both income and wealth. Whatever the reasons were for the Crash of 1929 were, the Great Depression established its own environment, and people had to survive any way they could. There may have been enough food to feed those in need, but the system that allowed distribution to work, was itself not working. Landlords were used to getting rent on time, but the growing number of unemployed ran out of money, They were soon evicted. In agricultural areas, banks began to foreclose on unpaid loans and acquired the land itself in foreclosure proceedings. Industry closed down without orders for their products, so management fired more employees. In April, 1931, Henry Ford fired 75,000 workers, and there was no unemployment compensation then. People ran out of hope, housing, and money. Very much the same sequence occurred in Europe, and depletion of investment capital reduced the buying power of the European consumer. The American export market weakened, and there was really not much European industry could export to acquire dollars. American industry needed help. Within months of the Great Crash of 1929, industry demanded protection. They got it in the form of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act of 1930. By imposing a stiff tariff on imports, business theorized that the tariff would protect American business weakened by the market's loss of liquidity, ie., no cash. A staggering European market could not absorb its own productivity, much less that exported to it from the United States. Furthermore, some European governments retaliated by imposing high tariffs on American exports. The Great Depression rapidly became a worldwide disaster. Agriculture was hit the hardest. In 1915, farmers produced slightly over one billion bushels of wheat on 60 million acres, the largest yield in history. Sales at this price sparked a frenzy of land speculation during and after World War I. The wartime Food Control Act set a price of $2.00 a bushel, more than double what the farmers had been getting. The land speculation frenzy was financed by mortgaging and re-mortgaging their land. By 1920, the debt load rose to $8.4 billion with $574 million of annual interest. The price of wheat did not remain at its high of $2.19 in 1919. Instead, it declined to less than a dollar a bushel in 1922. Other commodities suffered similar price declines, while other fixed costs increased.


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While labor productivity increased by an astonishing 43 percent from 1919 to 1929, wages increased only slowly during the same period, not anywhere near the rate of production. As a consequence, more and more American workers could not afford to buy what they produced, nor could a significant amount of production be exported. Unions were not much help. The AFL under Samuel Gompers was conservative, dominated by the craft unions. Union membership declined from a high of 5.1 million in 1920 to 3.4 million in 1929. Corporate America blossomed. In the period between 1919 and 1929, some 1,200 mergers swallowed up more than 6,000 previously independent companies. By 1929, some 200 corporations controlled almost 50 percent of all American industry. As usual banks financed business expansion, but they also financed land speculation. In the general frenzy of the Roaring '20s, banks acquired some bad habits. Management was often corrupt, made too many loans without security, particularly to companies in which bank officers were interested, and promoted speculative enterprises. The banks, said one banker, had "provided everything for the customers but a roulette wheel." In 1929, they had to face the music, just like everyone else. The survivors now had to sift through the wreckage to see what was left to salvage. Not all the wreckage was caused by the Depression. In 1927, the Mississippi Valley suffered from terrible floods, and the Red Cross stepped in and brought relief to hundreds of thousands who had lost their homes. In 1930, President Hoover asked the Red Cross to help again by providing food to the survivors of the looming financial depression, but on this occasion help was needed nationwide. In the South, local Red Cross volunteers thought people should rely on their own resources. The real reason was quite different. Local chairmen were mostly planters who did not want their workers to avoid picking cotton by being somewhere else when food might be distributed.

Drought refugees from South Dakota

Not all farmers engaged in land speculation, but those who did got burned. They could not even pay interest on their bank loans, so the banks foreclosed in an effort to acquire the land themselves at foreclosure sales. Other farmers created a protective ring around one of their own and by threats, prevented anyone from buying the property at more than a token amount. Farmers who lost their land, either to a bank by foreclosure, or to Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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the deadly loss of rich topsoil in the drought and winds of 1934, left for California by the hundreds of thousands. Migrants from the Dust Bowl of Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma and other Mid-West states picked up what little was left of their meager possessions and left for California by the thousands. Eventually, over a million "Okies" and "Arkies" moved west. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was the story of what one family from Oklahoma found in California. Alan Brinkley wrote an article in Past Imperfect: History According to Hollywood. Here's an excerpt of what he wrote about the book, later made into a film. There were signs of hopelessnes, to be sure: The main characters [in The Grapes of Wrath], the Joads, came to the end of their long ordeal in worse shape than when they began it -- the family dispersing, their possessions washed away in a flood, their prospects bleak. There were signs, too, of anger -- in the unvarying harshness of Steinbeck's portraits of bankers, landowners, local sheriffs, and other capitalist flunkies; in the bitter commentary on the human costs of industrial 'progress' (explicit in the novel, implicit in the film); and in the radicalism of Tom Joad, who, having killed a policeman (justifiably, Steinbeck suggests), leaves the family late in both the novel and the film to join an unspecified movement committed to social struggle. He promises his mother: 'Wherever they's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there.

The mood of the country was one of anger; the unemployed, evicted for non-payment of rent, and without enough food for their children or their entire family, threatened to take food from stores unless they were given food at no cost. Most of the people in bread lines had lost everything, including cash. For a while, 5,000 homeless people sold apples on the streets of New York City.

Depression bread line

In the spring of 1932, veterans of World War I were without work, and a hungry family marched to Washington to demand the war bonus then, not years in the future.These foot soldiers of the Bonus Army demanded that Congress pay them now. The Bonus Army consisted of about twenty thousand veterans from all over the country. Congress heard the message, and the House authorized payment of the war bonus, but the Senate rejected the measure authorizing payment. Discouraged, some of the veterans left, but most of them stayed, living in shacks made out of


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packing crates and discarded newspapers. President Herbert Hoover ordered the Army to evict them. General Douglas McArthur was in command of the cavalry, tanks and infantry charged with removing these homeless veterans. Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, later a president of the United States, was McArthur's aide. The Army used tear gas to disperse the veterans, injuring 1,000 of them in the process. Shots were fired killing two veterans. This shameless use of force surely influenced the outcome of the election a few months later. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat from Hyde Park, New York defeated Herbert Hoover in a landslide. Roosevelt got 57.4 percent of the total popular vote of 39,759,000 and 472 electoral votes to Hoover's 59 electoral votes. Norman Thomas, a Socialist candidate, got 885,000 votes, while William Foster, the Communist candidate got 103,000 popular votes.

Roosevelt accepting nomination at the convention, 1932. Roosevelt broke tradition in coming to the convention to accept the nomination in person.

Roosevelt was elected Governor of New York in 1928. Friends urged him to at least see for himself what damage the Great Depression had created. According to one of his many biographers, he was so affected by the sight of misery, hunger and utter despair that he said he would run for president. This suggestion seems too simplistic. Roosevelt was not unfamiliar with Washington, having served as an Assistant Secretary of the Navy in Wilson's Cabinet. As a young man, he had been crippled by polio, and it was an exercise of sheer will that allowed him to even get out of a chair. Roosevelt was sworn in as president on March 4, 1933 and almost immediately sent measures to Congress to stabilize a shattered economy. Amongst these measures was the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). In this act approved by Congress, business, labor, and government all agreed to various codes fixing prices and wages, and limiting competition. The general public, those most affected by the policies of the NIRA, had no voice in developing this instrument of business power.Two years later, it was held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Schechter Poultry v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935). In a unanimous opinion, the court held that the act was an unconstitutional delegation of lawmaking power to the executive branch of the government. Writing for the court, Chief Justice Hughes first warned the government that "Extraordinary [economic] conditions do not create or enlarge constitutional power...Such assertions of extraconstitutional authority were anticipated and precluded by the explicit terms of the Tenth Amendment -- "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Other problems spawned by the depression included the wholesale loss of homes and farms through foreclosure of delinquent mortgages. Even though the Supreme Court was considering a state law enacted in Minnesota, Roosevelt's New Deal got a boost from the court in Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell, 290 U.S. 398 (1934). By a 5-4 vote, the court held that the state moratorium on foreclosure of mortgages did not violate the Contracts Clause of the Constitution. Chief Justice Hughes ruled for five members of the court that contracts were subject to the reasonable exercise of the police power which encompassed the authority to provide temporary relief from extraordinary economic distress. In another 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court upheld a milk control law as a reasonable means of stabilizing milk prices. Nebbia v. New York, 291 U.S. 502 (1934). This ruling signaled an important shift away from economic due process and judicial supervision of state regulatory legislation. Writing for the court, Justice Roberts emphasized that a state could "validly adopt whatever economic policy may reasonably be deemed to promote the general welfare." He added that "The Constitution does not guarantee the unrestricted privilege to engage in a business or to conduct it as one pleases." This sentence probably signaled there would be further limits on laissez faire constitutionalism. The agricultural practice of mortgaging farm property for slightly more than 50 percent of its appraised value during the 1920s was one example of land speculation dealt with in Louisville Joint Stock Land Bank v. Radford, 295 U.S. 555 (1935). In 1933, Congress enacted the Frazier-Lemke Act adding Section 75 to the Bankruptcy Act. Amongst other things, this amendment provided that a farmer who had failed to obtain the consent of his creditors to a composition for their benefit might obtain favorable treatment in resolving his bankruptcy problem.This meant that the bankrupt might be able to buy his property back at the appraised value acquiring title and the right of possession. If the bank refused to assent, the bankrupt could stay the bankruptcy proceedings for five years and remain in possession of the property with an option to purchase it at any time during the five-year period. On these facts, which were quite common in the 1930s during the depression, Congress tried to help the farmers who were in desperate straits. The Supreme Court held the act was void and represented a "taking" of property without compensation was not consistent with the Fifth Amendment. Justice Brandeis wrote for a unanimous court that "however great the nation's need, private property shall not be thus taken even for a wholly public purpose without just compensation."


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Congress tried to stabilize the agricultural market as part of Roosevelt's New Deal. It passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act. It authorized subsidies to farmers in exchange for reducing the amount of acrerage on which they could plant crops. Overproduction, it was thought, would reduce commodity prices for all farmers. To raise revenue for this scheme, Congress imposed a "processing tax" on the first processor of such commodities. In United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1 (1936), the court invalidated this tax, concluding that the ostensible tax was in fact a means of regulating agriculture at the state level in violation of the Tenth Amendment. It was in 1936 that Franklin Roosevelt sought reelection to carry on the New Deal program that the Supreme Court had left almost in tatters. In 1936, the Republican candidate was Alfred Landon. Roosevelt won in another landslide. He got 60.8 percent of the popular vote of 45,655,000 and 523 electoral votes to Landon's 8 votes in the electoral college. Some voters remembered the rash of widespread strikes in 1934. Longshoremen in the San Francisco Bay Area went on strike in a rank-and-file insurrection against their own union leadership. They demanded termination of the shape-up, an early morning exercise in dividing the work and loathed by union members. The teamsters cooperated, and maritime workers went on strike. Police violence left two strikers shot and killed. and a general strike was called by the union. About 130,000 workers heeded the call, and San Francisco was immobilized. In a strident editorial, the Los Angeles Times denounced the strike as a "Communistinspired revolt against organized government." It was nothing of the sort. Most of those on strike were not paid enough to buy even the necessities of life -- food, housing, and health care. Finally, threatened by more police and heavily armed National Guard personnel. Harry Bridges longshoremen accepted a compromise settlement rather than the risk of more violence. In the same summer of 1934, the teamsters went on strike in Minneapolis, and two strikers were killed by the police. Fifty thousand people attended the funeral, and a march on City Hall followed. Finally, the employers capitulated and agreed to the teamsters' demands. In the fall of 1934, 350,000 textile workers went on strike in the South, declining to accept policy from their own union leadership. Seven strikers were killed by police. Armed strikebreakers were hired by the company for use against the workers. However, the strike spread to Massachusetts and Rhode Island. By September, some 420,000 textile workers were on strike throughout the entire country. In the rural South, the Great Depression left farmers poorer than ever. Roosevelt's Agricultural Adjustment Act forced tenants and sharecroppers to leave the land where, even then, they had farm income of about $300 a year. Some historians note that union organizers in the South were often


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labeled Communists. However, it may be doubted that these organizers were even remotely familiar with the dialectics of Communism from Marx and Lenin. Even though some of them actually joined a party identified as Communist, they did little more than nourish the grievances of the poor, white and black alike.

Depression in the South

One of labor's tactics was the sit-down strike, and union members literally occupied the plant in which they were working. A major example of this tactic appeared in the 1936 strike against Firestone Tire & Rubber in Akron, Ohio. In the midst of the Great Depression, their wages were too low to pay the rent and buy food for the family. When management saw how its entire operation might be shut down, it capitulated. A few days later, there was a sit-down strike at Goodyear's plant. A court issued an injunction that was ignored, and police deputies were sworn in for service against the striking workers. In a month the strike ended; the police were unwilling to take on the 10,000 workers around the plant supporting those inside. In late December, 1936 there was still another sit-down strike against the Fisher Body plant a part of General Motors in Flint, Michigan. This sit-down strike ended forty-six days later, when General Motors recognized the United Auto Workers -- Congress of Industrial Organizations (UAW-CIO). In Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century By Those Who Lived It, Studs Terkel interviewed Victor Reuther. Remember, with the memory of the early 30s depression was still fresh in their [the workers on strike] minds and they had only a few weeks of steady paychecks under their belts. They didn't want to stand in long hiring lines all over again. Their only hope was to build a union in which they'd have a voice -- the right to sit down with corporate heads and say, 'These are our minimal demands covering work and wages.' Democracy, if put in words ordinary people understand, has a powerful appeal. It is not enough to have a political democracy where you get to cast a vote every two years -- if you bother to. You must have the democratic right every day and every hour of your working life to shape the conditions under which you work.

Victor Reuther and his brother Walter were founding members of the UAW-CIO. Subsequently, Walter Reuther served as president of the UAW, until he died in a plane crash. However, he lived long enough to see enactment by Congress of the National Labor Relations Act, Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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sometimes known as the Wagner Act, and pushed by President Roosevelt as part of his New Deal. This act guaranteed the right of workers to organize unions both in businesses operating in interstate commerce and in businesses affecting interstate commerce, and prohibited employers from dismissing or otherwise discriminating against their employees because of union membership or activities. The Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, held the act was a valid exercise by Congress of its power to regulate interstate commerce. National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1 (1937). By upholding the National Labor Relations Act on this basis, the court signaled that it would no longer veto the national government's attempts to regulate the economy. Frustrated by the court's earlier invalidation of so much of his New Deal legislation, Roosevelt threatened to get the power from Congress to appoint more justices to the Supreme Court, thereby getting a majority for New Deal proposals. His "court-packing" plan was defeated in Congress, but some legal scholars attribute the court's new views of regulation to Roosevelt's threat to enlarge the membership of the Supreme Court. After taking office in 1933, the Roosevelt Administration sent a bill to Congress that authorized the largest hydroelectric project in history, the Tennessee Valley Project (TVA). Three years later, a legal challenge to TVA reached the Supreme Court, and it was held to be a constitutionally valid exercise of Congressional power to provide for national defense. Ashwander v. Tennesse Valley Authority, 297 U.S. 288 (1936). The sale of electricity to private companies was authorized by Article IV of the Constitution, Section 3. During the years of World War II, the TVA produced the power used by the Manhattan Project. It was this very secret project that designed the atomic bomb, and later, the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki used at the end of World War II. Other, less militant projects helped artrists and people in the theater. The New Deal provided federal funds to put thousands of writers, artists, actors, and musicians to work. Murals appeared both outside and inside of public buildings. Plays were put on for working-class audiences who might not have ever seen a play, and people may have heard a symphony for the first time. These projects during the 1930s were a continuation of the artistic impulse Ann Douglas described in her book, Terrible Honesty, published in 1995. In 1935, George and Ira Gershwin wrote the great American opera, Porgy and Bess. Some observers saw Bessie Smith, a great black singer of the 1920s, as the model for Bess in the opera, an enduring musical still performed today.


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Porgy & Bess Scene from the 1959 film version

The 1930s were a creative period for music and the legitimate stage. Cole Porter was a brilliant, prolific composer of music for the stage and screen. He was the composer of the music showcasing Gay Divorcée (1932), Anything Goes (1934), and Red Hot and Blue (1934). This show featured Ethel Merman and Bob Hope. Porter wrote the glittering music of "Night and Day," "I Get a Kick Out of You," "Begin the Beguine," "Just One of Those Things," "Love for Sale," and "In the Still of the Night."

Cole Porter

On the more serious side, the 1920s and 1930s produced a Nobel Prize winning playright, Eugene O'Neill. By the time Beyond the Horizon was produced in 1920, O'Neill already had a solid repuatation as playwright. Later dramas included Anna Christie, Strange Interlude, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and Mourning Becomes Electra. O'Neill's only comedy was Ah, Wilderness. The others all explored the tragic theme and Anna Christie dealt with the "whore with a heart of gold" theme. In 1936, O'Neill was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature. His writing was liked by Sweden. It identified with August Strindberg whose plays with tragic themes influenced O'Neill. The playwright Arthur Miller's classic drama was Death of a Salesman which opened in New York in 1949. Willie Loman was the salesman. Of Loman, it was said "He is a person; attention must be paid." Death of a Salesman was a classic American story of a small man destroyed by false values that in large part were the values of Miller's society during the 1930s. The Crucible, produced in 1953 was based on the Salem witchcraft trials of the seventeenth Century. This period was considered relevant during the early 1950s because of Joseph McCarthy's witchhunting of Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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subversives. Miller refused to name ten people he had seen at a meeting of alleged subversives and was convicted of contempt of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, On appeal, his conviction was reversed. Just after the end of World War II, Tennessee Williams opened in New York with his play, Glass Menagerie. In later years, Williams wrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Streetcar Named Desire, Night of the Iguana, and many others. By 1983, the year of his death, Williams was internationally acclaimed. One of his plays, Orpheus Descending had been performed in Moscow for seven years. Russians considered Williams as great as Chekhov. His novel, The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone, was produced as a very successful film by Hollywood. One of the most talented musicians of the 1950s was Alan Jay Lerner. In the 1930s, he was learning his trade at a private school in Connecticut. Lerner organized the school jazz orchestra and wrote original music for it. Like his contemporaries, he served in the military during World War II. After negotiating for the rights to George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, he and Fritz Loew went to work on the music and lyrics of what is today probably considered one of America's greatest musical shows, My Fair Lady. It opened on Broadway in 1951 and became an instant success. Rex Harrison played the lead, Henry Higgins, and Julie Andrews was the poor florist, Eliza Doolittle, who was taught by Harrison -- he played the role of Henry Higgins, a speech therapist -- to speak in proper English instead of with her Cockney accent. The music and lyrics were pure poetry. In 1964, the film version was released, and Sir Rex Harrison revived the stage version in 1980. At one point, Lerner was being paid about $10 million a year in royalties for My Fair Lady and other musicals he wrote. Camelot was one of them.

My Fair Lady Julie Andrews as Liza Doolittle

As usual, Hollywood was busy revising both history and stereotypes in the 1930s. Jewish songwriters were not really free of the antagonism found in all immigrant groups. Irving Berlin, for example, did not appreciate the black sources of some of his music. And Tin Pan Alley, the


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center of a musician's life in New York, didn't always like the JewishNegro connection. Berlin wrote the music and lyrics for Alexander's Ragtime Band. Hollywood's Darryl Zanuck produced it in 1935. As Ann Douglas wrote "Alexander was nothing like the coon shouter portrayed in the song but rather a well-bred Wasp violinist played, laughably, by Tyrone Power."

The Glen Miller Band Playing at the Great lakes Naval training station in 1942.

The Big Band Sound was a musical culture that originated in Manhattan -- it went national in the 1930s -- Benny Goodman with his clarinet and "Sing, Sing, Sing, Sing" with Gene Krupa on the drums, Glen Miller with "String of Pearls," Tommy Dorsey and "Marie, I Hear You Calling," and Bunny Berrigan with "I Can't Get Started With You" on his great trumpet. There was also a social artifact, the dé but of the Social Register children. Almost every day during Christmas and Spring Holidays, there were tea, dinner, and supper parties for the débutantes. Brenda Frazier was perhaps the best known for her 1937 party at the old Ritz Carlton Hotel in midtown Manhattan. It ended in the small hours of the next day. Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Houston adopted the dé but with enthusiasm before and after World War II.

Benny Goodman in 1937

Harlem was still the center of black musical culture. It produced musicians like Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong, the poetry of Langston Hughes, and the voices of singers like Bessie Smith, Billie Holliday, and Pearl Bailey. These and other artists dominated the musical culture. These and other performers lived in Harlem which suffered from the Great Depression. In 1932, in Harlem Hospital proportionately twice as many people died as in its downtown counterpart, Bellevue Hospital. In spite of the New


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Deal, blacks in Harlem rioted, doing considerable damage to the shops of white merchants who profited from black misery. With significant exceptions, black Americans were left out of the New Deal; in both North and South they were virtually invisible. Roosevelt might have made some progress in the South, but he could not afford to alienate Southern senators or members of the House. By 1940, labor unions, the whites of the South and New Deal liberals were Roosevelt's core constituency. Roosevelt even declined to move an anti-lynching bill for fear of alienating the South. Lynchings were not the only form of intimidation in the South. Every black American was afraid to vote for fear of violence. The Social Security Act of 1935 was another New Deal program criticized by some historians for those it omitted to help -- farmers, domestic help, and the elderly. However, from time to time, Congress amended this act to provide greater benefits, including the cost of living adjustment. At the time the Social Security Act was passed, its meager benefits were probably the only money some people saw for years. Roosevelt's New Deal also provided an early version of the Food Stamp program. It was administered by the Department of Agriculture and might be terminated in 1996 by a Republican Congress, unless vetoed by President Clinton. During his campaign for the White House in 1992, Clinton made an unfortunate promise "to end welfare as we know it." The welfare system may not be a gem, but the GOP argued that it caused family breakdown. It doesn't, says James Carville in his new book, We're Right, They're Wrong: A Handbook for Spirited Progressives.It's an answer to widespread poverty even worse than the poverty that sparked Roosevelt's response. In an unprecedented move, Franklin Roosevelt sought reelection to a third term in 1940. His opponent was Republican utility lawyer, Wendell Wilkie. The total popular vote was 49,900,000, and Roosevelt won with 54.7 percent of this vote. Roosevelt got 449 electoral votes to Wilkie's 82 votes. World War II had begun a year earlier on September 3, 1939, and the world was about to change. Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp. Heinrich Himmler, a notorious anti-Semite, convened a press conference on March 20, 1933 at which he announced the establishment of the first formal concentration camp. Initially, it was used to imprison political dissidents, such as Communists, Social Democrats, and trade unionists. Dachau was located only a few miles from Munich. It became the model and training center for all other SS-organized camps. During World War II, it became the first and most important camp at which doctors had laboratories in which they performed cruelties beyond measure in the guise of medical experimentation using involuntary inmates, principally Jews. After the


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war, the doctors from Dachau and other camps were tried for war crimes at Nuremberg. Seven of them were sentenced to death. Dachau Survivors of Dachau, the worst concentration camp in Germany. They line the electric fence to cheer the liberation forces.

Buchenwald Liberated prisoners eating scraps at Buchenwald

Once again as in looking at the origins of World I, it is essential to revisit Japan and consider some its history. Japan was an island empire ruled by an hereditary Emperor, Hirihito in the 1930s. It had no raw materials and imported all its oil either from the Middle East, Indonesia, or a combination of both. In 1917, President Wilson had authorized a note sent to Japan saying in part that "the Government of the United States recognizes that Japan has special interests in China." The major powers all supported an open door policy with respect to China; it allowed them to create small colonies on the periphery of cities in a country with the world's largest population. Shanghai was one of these colonies. Great Britain had leased Hong Kong from China for 100 years. The lease will terminate in 1997.


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In the 1930s, China was a country in transition from being a feudal dynasty with warlords controlling its provinces to a semi-dictatorial leader, General Chiang Kai-Shek who had no control over the warring warlords. Mao Tse-tung was in North China awaiting further developments. They were not long in coming.The Japanese, in need of raw materials and greater living room for its expanding population, invaded Manchuria in 1931. Within a year, Japan ruled Manchuria and had renamed it Manchukuo. Despite international criticism, Japan conquered Jehol in 1933, placing its armed forces within reach of Beijing. In 1937, Japanese troops landed in China and occupied Nanking. Their cruelty to the Chinese civilians enraged the western world, and the Rape of Nanking went down as possibly the beginning of a Japanese attempt to expand its military presence further into China. Unabashed by further criticism, Japanese troops overran Hankow and Canton in 1938. In the same year, Japan's Prime Minister, Prince Konoye announced his country's objective. In the field of industry, the basic principle of the Government will be laid in the increase of our nation's productive power under one comprehensive scheme covering Japan, Manchukuo, and China, and efforts are to be exerted towards supplying the articles needed for national defense, promoting all the more important industries and expanding our export trade.

Japan was an expansionist and for good reason; it had to import more raw materials like oil, tin, rubber, and iron to name a few. These existed in significant quantities in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and the Phillippines, then a territory of the United States. Japan also needed an export market for its finished products. The Japanese officials proclaimed a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of influence. In fact, Japan was industrializing its economy rapidly and needed these raw materials. They had discovered that with rapid industrialization, Japan lost cropland overriding the rise in land productivity. Essentially, Japan had to have arable land to expand food production. And despite treaties reducing the size and configuration of naval warships, Japan found ways around these treaty limitations. As the United States later discovered, quite a few of Japan's carrier aircraft were models of the German ME109. A reasonable case may be made for the proposition that Japan anticipated a war it would start, probably under cover of diplomatic negotiations. Some of its military adventurism in China was merely a prelude to an expanded war. After all, the Japanese had learned from Germany, Italy, and Spain that its armed forces needed training under real conditions. The Spanish Civil War in 1936 was an early example of the same principle. There, however, Germany shipped its aircraft and other weapons to General Francisco Franco. A revolt of the Spanish military put Franco in charge of Spain, opposed only by the Spanish Republicans. Roosevelt


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had tried an end run around America's Neutrality Act by shipping weapons to France for transfer to the Republicans. Italy, too, under Benito Mussolini, decided it needed land in Africa, so it chose Ethiopia and bombed its helpless unarmed civilians. King Haile Selassie appeared before the League of Nations which could do no more than protest helplessly while the carnage continued. The same atmosphere of helplessness kept the French from doing anyrthing constructive when Hitler's armed forces marched into the Rhineland in 1936, territory Germany had lost as a result of World War I. All of this military strutting of the dictators like Japan's Hideki Tojo, Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini produced a reaction from President Roosevelt. On October 5, 1937 before a crowd of some 50,000 people at the dedication of Chicago's Outer Drive Bridge, a Public Work's Administration project, Roosevelt delivered his "Quarantine" address. The only paragraph in which the word "quarantine" appeared was only a little over two lines in the entire speech, even though the paragraph preceding had stated that "It seems to be unfortunately true that the epidemic of world lawlessness was spreading. When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease." Yet Roosevelt's prompted comment nationwide, most of it favorable, apparently easing the public perception of possible American involvement in war. An examination of the White House files now in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park reveals that the wires and letter the president received were overwhelmingly favorable. Clearly, Roosevelt meant Japan should be quarantined, and on the next day, the League of Nations adopted a motion censuring Japan. The censure came far too late; leaders of the Western world, including Roosevelt and England's Baldwin should have known war was imminent. In Germany, the Nazis were clearly headed for war, and their persecution of the Jews became worse than ever. On November 10, 1938 the Nazi thugs went on a murderous spree of threats and vilification of Jews plus widespread damage to their shops and homes throughout Germany. Historians named it "Crystalnacht," the "Night of the Shattered Glass." Nazi Germany had rearmed despite language in the Treaty of Versailles limiting rearmament. Less than a year later, Germany was at war with Poland. France and England, bound to defend Poland by treaty, declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. War was the German goal. Hitler had said repeatedly that Germany needed Lebensraum -- more land for its population. In 1938, the Austrian Anschluss occurred, and it became part of Germany by force. Hitler was not content. He demanded the area of


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Czechoslovakia known as the Sudentenland, an area with a significant German population. Great Britain's Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, went to Munich and returned to London waving a paper signed by Hitler. "Peace in our time," announced Chamberlain to a cheering airport crowd. War followed this announcement within a few months. Whether the Soviet Union actually anticipated Germany's plans seems uncertain. However, weeks before war began, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's Minister of Foreign Affairs signed a cynical agreement with Joseph Stalin in Moscow. This agreement allowed Stalin to partition Poland once again after its defeat by the Nazis, and it allowed Stalin to annex the Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Actually, for fifty years, the Soviet Union denied the existence of the secret Protocol allowing the annexation of the Baltic states. Soviet troops occupied all three of these countries beginning in 1940. Publicly, the agreement was described as the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. Critics of this agreement argued that Stalin signed the agreement with Germany to buy time for the Soviet Union to modernize and expand its military against the anticipated attack against the Soviet Union by Germany. However, Allied intelligence was able to fix the date of the German attack, but Stalin didn't believe what he was told. As a result, Nazi forces were initially successful and advanced within striking distance of Moscow. In the United States, President Roosevelt was determined to help Great Britain despite the Neutrality Act. The Selective Service Act of 1940 passed with only one vote to spare. There was a mood of isolationism in the country, so Roosevelt had to move carefully. Even his Lend-Lease deal came in for criticism. By it, the United States aquired the use of military bases like Bermuda and other possessions of Great Britain in the Caribbean Sea in exchange for lending Britain some old, surplus destroyers. The British Navy had to protect its convoys from attacks by German submarines. During his campaign against Wendell Wilkie in 1940, Roosevelt addressed Congress on May 16, 1940. "These are ominous days,"he said, "days whose swift and shocking developments force every neutral nation to look to its defenses in the light of new factors....No old defense is so strong that it requires no further strengthening and no attack is so unlikely or impossible that it may be ignored." However, America's armed forces were in a sad state of unpreparedness for modern warfare with its emphasis on aircraft and tanks. So Roosevelt, in a shrewd move, created the National Defense Advisory Commission. Its seven members were appointed by the president and drawn from the very industries that had denounced Roosevelt for what they claimed were his New Deal excesses.


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The new Commission was literally charged with converting the American economy from a peacetime to a wartime footing without actually being at war. However, the frightening advance of Hitler's armies into France dramatized the plight in which England and France found themselves in June, 1940. In one of his first military mistakes, Hitler ordered a three-day pause, before allowing his victorious forces to proceed against British forces, cleaning them up at Dunkirk before entering Paris. The pause was long enough for a motley collection of boats, from yachts to corvettes and destroyers to rescue and deliver safely to British shores, some 350,000 men. On this occasion, Winston Churchill, having replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister, addressed Parliament. "We shall not flag or fail," Churchill promised. "We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall in the seas and oceans....we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle until in God's good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old." On June 10,1940 Benito Mussolini fearing he might not share in the spoils of the German victory, persuaded Italy to declare war on England and France. Fortuitously, Roosevelt was delivering an address to the University of Virginia one day later. In his speech, Roosevelt dropped any lingering notion that the United States was neutral. "On this tenth day of June," he told the students, "the hand that held the dagger has struck it into France's back." Almost exactly a year later, Germany invaded Russia on June 22, 1940. This stunning event certainly signaled that Germany had postponed any thought of invading England. Hitler's generals had been concerned. A war on two fronts at the same was a military nightmare to them. Communists in the United States had to make a swift policy reversal. Instead of demanding that Roosevelt stop rearming England, its spokesmen switched sides in less than a day. According to Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of No Ordinary Time, "Michael Quill, left-leaning head of the Transport Workers of New York was delivering an angry speech denouncing the imperialist war, arguing that the American worker should have nothing to do with it. In the middle of his speech, he was handed a note informing him the Nazis had invaded the Soviet Union. Without missing a beat, Quill


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totally changed direction, arguing that 'we must all unite and fight for democracy." Others thought to be Communist-oriented changed their tune almost as quickly as Quill. In July, 1940 Japan invaded French Indochina, and Roosevelt agreed to a policy of sanctions, including an embargo on oil from which high-octane aircraft fuel might be refined. General Hideki Tojo, who by this time, had replaced Prince Konoye as Prime Minister of Japan, indicated negotiations with the United States might be productive. He was willing to withdraw from Indochina, but not China. Tojo told his emissaries in Washington that they must be successful by the end of November, 1941. They were unsuccessful, so Japanese carrier aircraft treacherously attacked Pearl Harbour in the early hours of the day on December 7, 1941, while its emissaries were still discussing peace in Washington. For more details on Japan, see The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931-1945 released by the Princeton University Press in June, 1996. The next day, President Roosevelt asked Congress to approve his request that the United States and Japan were at war with each other. Congress approved immediately. Then, on December 11, 1941 Adolf Hitler, Chancellor of Germany's Third Reich declared war on the United States. World War II had begun, but with the greatest naval disaster in history at Pearl Harbour. Eight battleships were either sunk or seriously damaged along with three destroyers and light cruisers. Fortunately, all Navy carriers were at sea. However, most Army aircraft were destroyed on the ground. The Japanese followed up this victory with further action in the Far East. On December 10,1941 two formidable British battleships were sunk by Japanese aircraft. On December 25, British forces in Hong Kong surrendered to the Japanese. By January 2, 1942 Manila, the capital of the Phillippines, was occupied by Japanese troops, and American troops surrendered. General Douglas McArthur and the remaining American troops took refuge in the fortress of Corregidor from which General McArthur was evacuated by an American submarine. In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, California particularly saw a growing hysteria directed against Japanese, many of them citizens of the United States. Many Californians anticipated an attack on the West Coast, and General John DeWitt added fuel to the fire by intemperate public comments, some of them false. Thus, on February 20, 1942 President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. This order gave General DeWitt the authority he needed to exclude Japanese from just about any part of the West Coast. Francis Biddle, who was then Attorney General of the United States later noted that Roosevelt was not all that concerned with the constitutional implications of his action. The United States was at war with Japan, and the American military was in charge of what Roosevelt


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treated as a wartime measure. It didn't matter to him that most of those who were interned in relocation centers were American citizens. Two years later, the Supreme Court upheld his action, but there were strong dissents. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U. S. 214 (1944). The majority of six held that exclusion of Japanese, including those who were American citizens, was within the war powers of Congress and the Executive. In his dissent, Justice Roberts noted there had been no individualized hearings providing any basis for shipping all Japanese to relocation centers, as had been the case with German and Italian detainees. Justice Jackson wrote that "the law which this prisoner is convicted of disregarding is not found in an act of Congress, but in a military order. Neither the Act of Congress nor the Executive Order of the President, nor both together, would afford a basis for this conviction. It rests on the orders of General DeWitt." In Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81 (1943), the Supreme Court also upheld a curfew directed against all those Japanese, whether citizens or not, to prevent espionage or sabotage. Some 110,000 Japanese had to spend at least four years in relocation camps far from home. About 70,000 of them were citizens of the United States. They lost their homes, their businesses and their liberty. Very early in the war, Roosevelt became involved in racial conflict. By 1940, the population of Detroit had grown as whites migrated from farmlands in the South to the urban centers of the North where war plants had proliferated and jobs beckoned. Along with the white migrants, some 50,000 blacks moved to Detroit competing for the same jobs. Housing, in short supply with this population explosion became scarcer and overpriced. Clark Foreman, a Southerner, was an official of the Federal Works Agency. The FWA planned a 200-unit housing project designed for black defense workers. When news of this appeared in the Detroit press, white workers were infuriated. In Congress, an appropriation for the housing project was conditioned on white occupancy. Civil rights leaders reacted angrily, and matters got back on course. The Detroit Housing Commission selected black tenants. On February 28, 1942 the new tenants were scheduled to move in. When they appeared with the household goods, they were greeted by hundreds of white pickets armed with a variety of weapons. In the ensuing battle, many on both sides were wounded, and occupancy was postponed. Three months later, it took troops off the Michigan National Guard to protect the new tenants who moved in without incident. The Navy itself was segregated by race. However, with pressure from the White House, the Navy finally allowed black Americans to enlist in the Navy as gunners, radiomen and so forth without being assigned to their original positions as mess attendants, ie., waiters.


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Race was still a factor in wartime production. The population of Mobile, Alabama had expanded rapidly after 1940, drawn by its shipyards. Many of the new arrivals brought racial predjudice with them, and an ugly incident was the result. Some skilled black welders were upgraded and assigned to work next to white welders working on ships for the defense effort. In the morning shift, one white worker shouted that "No nigger was going to join iron in these yards," and fighting was ignited. The Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) restored a measure of peace by agreeing that black welders should be assigned to another shipway to work in a segregated area. While President Roosevelt had created the FEPC by Executive Order, it had no enforcement powers. On the next day, race riots broke out in Belle Isle, Michigan. By the time federal troops arrived on the scene -- Michigan's governor, Harry Kelly claimed he could control the situation with local police -- some twenty-five black Americans had been killed by whites, and nine whites died in the rioting. While predjudice would continue to deny black Americans the work they could perform for the war effort, the war itself continued. Early in the war, the Navy had its reverses but also its successes, however small they were. On April 18, 1942 a squadron of sixteen B-25s were launched from the Hornet, a Navy carrier for a raid on Tokyo with General Doolittle in command. The twin-engine B-25s were not designed for use on carriers, but the 1100 foot flight deck was just enough for the takeoff run. These planes reached Tokyo during daylight hours, dropped their bombs and continued on to land in China. This mission was followed in June by the Battle of Midway, a turning point in the naval war.

Secret US Rendevous Task forces Fox and Sugar meet prior to the Battle of Midway.

The Japanese organized a taskforce of ten battleships, four carriers, and seventy destroyers to seize Midway. However, the Navy had broken the Japanese Purple Code and knew when to strike. On June 4, 1942 Admiral Chester Nimitz launched his strike against the enemy taskforce. In the battle, Navy carrier aircraft sunk all four carriers, one heavy cruiser, three battleships, and destroyed 372 Japanese aircraft.One American carrier, the USS Yorktown, was sunk by the Japanese.


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Japanese Crusier Mogami The Mogami just before it sunk after being hit by US Navy Carrier bombers

USS Yorktown The USS Yorktown taking a direct hit from Japanese bombers.

Action on land involved the Marines. They landed in Guadalcanal in early 1942 and took heavy casualties. In the meantime, the Army with air cover from the Navy landed in North Africa in November, 1942 to begin the offensive matching General George Patton's armour against that of the German Desert Fox, Marshall Erwin Rommel. A combination of American, British, and Canadian troops defeated the Germans in North Africa, and the next move of the Allied Forces would be to Italy and beyond. See a documentary montage of the invasion of Normandy and the liberation of Paris.

On June 4, 1944 the combined forces of all the allies invaded Normandy in the first cross-channel invasion since William the Conqueror invaded England successfully in 1066. Joseph Stalin got the Second Front he so desperately needed to save the Soviet Union from the Nazi hordes that invaded Russia beginning on June 22, 1941. Arromanches, in France's Normandy was one of the coastal cities where the Allied Forces landed in 1944, not far from Omaha Beach. Its museum is a treasure of memorabilia of D-Day, June 4, 1944. The Allied armed forces began their march across Europe to Berlin on this day which was celebrated in 1995.


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D-Day View a gif animation of "the first out" on D-Day. (1.2Mb)

Before the war ended, however, President Roosevelt, Prime Minister of Great Britain and Generalissimo Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union met in Yalta from February 4 to February 11, 1945. The three discussed and agreed on several subjects that were to have awkward domestic political consequences for the United States in the postwar period, principally because the Soviet Union simply ignored some provisions of the Yalta Agreement. Article II stated in part that: The establishment of order in Europe and the rebuilding of national economic life must be achieved by processes which will enable the liberated peoples to destroy the last vestiges of naziism and fascism and to create democratic institutions of their own choice. This is a principle of the Atlantic Charter -- the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live -- the restoration of sovereign rights and self-government to those peoples who have been forcibly deprived of them by the aggressor nations.

Stalin insisted on including language that, by his interpretation, allowed Moscow to effectively dominate Poland in the immediate postwar period. Unfortunately, nothing was done to prevent the perpetuation of Soviet rule in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Rumania. By 1989, when all these countries got their freedom, historians uniformly agreed it was a mistake to allow the imposition on these countries of a Communist rule. Directed by Stalin, the Soviet Red Army imposed a goverment in each of the eastern Europe states inconsistent with the establishment of democratic institutions. Stalin also got language directing that Japan's Kurile Islands "be handed over to the Soviet Union." At Yalta, the Soviet Union expressed a readiness to use its armed forces to liberate China from "the Japanese yoke." Some Americans present at Yalta suggested at the time that Roosevelt was in poor health and should not have taken such a tiring trip to the Crimea for the Yalta Conference. They were probably correct. Roosevelt died two months after his return from Yalta. In the Pacific, the Marines and Army with air cover from the Navy moved from Eniwetok to the Mariannas and the Phillippines in 1944 and then from Guam and Tinian to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. From these islands, the Air Force began launching B-29 bombers against Japan itself in early 1945, and the end was in sight. In Europe, the Allied Forces entered Paris


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in August, 1944 and then took the surrender of Germany on May 9, 1945. On August 6, 1945 Air Force B-29s dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima and the second on Nagasaki three days later. Japan surrendered on August 14, 1945, and the war was over for some 19 million servicemen from seven nations united against Germany, Italy, and Japan. The casualties were enormous on all sides.

The Atomic Bomb The Atomic bomb is dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945.

Hiroshima Devastation after the atomic bombing

The Chief of Staff for the entire war effort in Europe was General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Roosevelt could not have spared General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the Army. Marshall had the confidence of Congress, something Roosevelt did not enjoy. The president, for example, vetoed the Smith-Connally Act that would have made a strike against war production illegal and subject to severe penalties. In less than a day, Congress voted successfully to override the veto by the two-thirds vote constitutionally required to do so. At the time, coal miners were being paid less than a living wage for doing dangerous work underground. The coal miners finally settled for portal-to-portal pay increase. This insured a pay increase the moment they went underground after arriving at the pit head. In 1944, Roosevelt was reelected to an unprecedented fourth term with some 53.4 percent of the popular vote and 432 electoral votes. His opponent was Thomas E. Dewey who got the highest percentage of the popular vote of any Republican candidate since 1932.


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On April 12, 1945 Roosevelt died of a stroke in Warm Springs, Georgia, and Harry Truman became President of the United States. Roosevelt was mourned by a saddened nation and buried at Hyde Park, his ancestral home in upstate New York. During the war, Roosevelt had never once mentioned to his Vice President Harry Truman , the Manhattan Project and what it was working on. Actually, the idea appeared in 1939 in a letter from Einstein to Roosevelt. In it, he outlined the theoretical possibilities of nuclear fission. The scientists -- one of them was Edward Teller -- agreed on the theoretical potential, and General Leslie Grove was named head of the Manhattan Project which throughout the war was classified at a level higher than Top Secret. So between April 12, 1945 and Truman's trip to Potsdam in July, Truman had to be told the details of the atomic bomb about to be tested in New Mexico. The actual test of the atomic bomb, code-named Trinity-occurred in New Mexico on July 17, 1945. William Lawrence was one of those present on this historic occasion.. In his book, Ground Zero, Lawrence wrote: And just at that instant there arose from the bowels of the earth a light not of this world, the light of many suns in one. It was a sunrise such as the world has never seen, a great green supersun climbing in a fraction of a second to a height of more than eight thousand feet, rising ever higher until it touched the clouds, lighting up earth and sky all around with a dazzling luminosity...With the flash came a delayed roll of mighty thunder heard, just as the flash was seen, for hundreds of miles...

President Truman was in Potsdam at the time of the successful test, so he could not have known then of the bomb's destructive power. At the time, Truman, Churchill and Stalin, met in Potsdam to consider how best Japan might be defeated and what terms should be imposed on Japan thereafter.The Potsdam Declaration was the joint effort of all three, and it got the concurrence of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. It called for Japan's unconditional surrender. On his return to Washington, some sixtynine scientists sent a petition to the president. Dated July 17, 1945 it was signed by Leo Szilard and 69 co-signers, its text was retrieved from the Internet Home Page of Leo Szilard. The third paragraph of the petition read as follows: The war has to be brought speedily to a successful conclusion and attacks by atomic bombs may very well be an effective method of warfare. We feel, however, that such attacks on Japan could not be justified, at least not unless the terms which will be imposed after the war on Japan were made public in detail and Japan were given an opportunity to surrender....The development of atomic power will provide the nations with new means of destruction. The atomic bomb at our disposal represent only the first step in this direction, and there is almost no limit to the destructive power which will become available in the course of their future development. Thus a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for


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purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility which is involved.

However, there was a Source Note attached to the Szilard petition. It listed the names of those signing it. The text had this observation: "It is reasonable to conclude that the lists were prepared and used for the purpose of administrative retaliation against the petition signers." History does not disclose whether President Truman actually read this petition drafted by Szilard, a physicist engaged in developing the atomic bomb together with Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Gar Alperovitz's book, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb: And the Architecture of an American Myth does not mention Szilard's petition. However, Lifton and Mitchell who collaborated on the 1995 book, Hiroshima: Fifty Years of Denial note the Szilard Petition was intercepted by General Leslie Grove and never reached President Truman. Lifton and Mitchell argue convincingly that the decision to use the atomic bomb was wrong at the time. Harry Truman clearly made a decision to use the bomb as the Air Force did on August 6, 1945. His decision was made on the basis of all the evidence available to him at that time. Truman's Secretary of State, James Byrnes supported use of the bomb against Japan. Its successful use, he claimed would give him a stronger position in dealing with Stalin. Even some of the high-ranking military commanders under Truman -- Admiral Nimitz and General Marshall opposed use of the bomb. President Truman never saw this letter. Evidently, it was rerouted by General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project. In 1995, the Smithsonian Institute found itself in the middle of a nasty dispute over an exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of the flight of the Enola Gay. It was the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The Smithsonian could have presented all sides of the issue whether the United States should have used the bomb at all. Instead, its approach was one-sided and infuriated historians. With federal funding threatened, the Smithsonian took the simple route and offered only the traditional, unquestioning explanation of the decision to use the bomb. At the time the original exhibition was toned down, Speaker Newt Gingrich applauded. "Political correctness," he said at a press conference, "may be ok in some faculty lounge, but the Smithsonian is a treasure that belongs to the American people and it should not become a plaything for left-wing ideologues." It seems odd that a former history teacher would criticize hearing all sides of the decision to use the bomb as left-wing ideology. Gingrich is not the only revisionist of history. Had the B-29 been shown without any comment at all other than words of honor, they would obscure its importance and even insult the memory of American troops who, without the use of the bomb, might have perished in an invasion of Japan. Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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The American Legion and the Air Force Association demanded only words of honor, and history was revised. There was virtually no evidence of the lethal radioactive particles released by explosion of the uranium core when it went into critical mass and exploded. This evidence of deadly radioactive fallout only surfaced months after use of the second bomb over Nagasaki; the Bikini test site and later, the Nevada Test Site. However, most of such evidence, not of the destructive power of the bomb, but its lethal fallout was suppressed by the government. For years, this coverup continued and now in 1995, many books disclosing its nature and extent are being published. It is a fact that every government administration up to at least 1974, including Truman's, lied about the fatal consequences of the indiscriminate release of radioactivity. Some of those around Truman were anxious to shorten the war to prevent the Soviet Union from declaring war on Japan. At Yalta, Stalin agreed to assist China by deploying its armed forces against Japan. Fifty years after Yalta, Russia had not withdrawn its troops from the Kurile Islands it was allowed to seize by the Yalta Agreement. Upon his return from Potsdam, Truman soon travelled to San Franciso for the meeting of the United Nations whose leaders or the designees were about to sign the United Nations Charter. In 1995, some 180 countries gathered in San Francisco to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the United Nations. Most Americans know there is a United Nations. It is in fact a treaty ratified by the Senate, two-thirds concurring. Congress also enacted a United Nations Participation Act, thus incorporating the Charter into the supreme law of the United States. Two of its many articles are worth noting. Article 2 (4) appears below: 4. All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.

Article 51 provides as follows: Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defense shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.


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Foreign policy and the decision to use the atomic bomb were certainly not the only problems President Truman inherited. Racial upheavals were perhaps one of his major domestic problems. And during the war, women by the thousands worked in the defense plants, turning out everything from aircraft to tanks and ships plus a great deal in most other products. "Rosie the Riveter" became a symbol of all those women who worked to win the war. When the war finally ended , servicemen returning home would want their old jobs back, and women would have to return to the kitchen, or so it was thought by many. Since food was rationed (as was fuel for cars), there had to be price controls to limit inflation. With the protean ingenuity of speculators, a thriving black market existed in rationed goods. On occasion, families might legitimately trade their sugar coupons for those required to buy meat. Servicemen whose education had been postponed wanted to go back to school. In anticipation of this, Congress enacted the GI Bill of Rights. This measure financed the education of an estimated 3 million servicemen after the war. Furthermore, the economy had to be converted to peacetime production, but with the advent of nuclear weapons, the Manhattan Project remained in operation. So did the facilities at Alamagordo, New Mexico and the Livermore, California Lab. New industries dedicated to the production of nuclear weapons were built at Savannah, Georgia, Hanford, Oregon, and Denver, Colorado. Their operations, always a closely guarded secret, began polluting the atmosphere with radioactive and toxic particle discharge. By 1995, the safe disposal of radioactive waste had become an enormously expensive undertaking. The waste itself would have a half life of over ten thousand years. The war crimes trials began in Nuremberg, Germany on November 20, 1945. Twenty-one surviving leaders of Nazi Germany were about to enter a court invented for the purpose of judging them. Telford Taylor's book, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir, describes these trials of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Julius Streicher, Hjalmar Schacht, Rudolph Hess, Herman Göring, Albert Speer, Admiral Eric Doenitz, Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel and other war criminals. Taylor was a prosecutor at these trials which took place against a mise en sc”ne of horror at a level never before seen in the civilized world, the Holocaust. Some six million Jews were killed in death camps a few of which like Dachau, were built before World War II even began. It was at the Wannsee Conference inJanuary, 1942 that Hitler and his colleagues agreed on the Final Solution, extermination of German Jews. In her book, Albert Speer: His Battle for the Truth, Gita Sereny quoted one of the Wannsee participants. He described the killing process as "assembly line murder." And testimony at the Nuremberg trials showed beyond any reasonable doubt that those on trial knew what was going on.


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This is complicity in genocide, and its German rationale for engaging in genocide was taken from the archives of the Spanish Inquisition. Netanyahu analyzed them in scholarly detail in his recent book, Origins of the Spanish Inquisition. The Department of State in the Truman Administration had its scholars who contributed to the immediate postwar atmosphere with respect to a new policy toward the Soviet Union. A young Princeton graduate, George Kennan was in Moscow in 1946 as a State Department officer. Based on a series of wires he sent to Washington in 1946, the State Department adopted the new policy known as containment of Communism. "The USSR," he wrote, "still lives in antagonistic capitalist encirclement with which there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence." Kennan thought the problem could be solved. Following the end of World War II, the Soviet Union was militarily weaker and their repressive system was not necessarily stable. For the forseeable future, the Communists would have to be contained. Kennan continued: Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventuristic. It does not work by fixed plans. It does not take unnecessary risks. Impervious to the logic of reason, it is highly sensitive to the logic of force. For this reason it can easily withdraw -- and usually does -- when strong resistance is encountered at any point. Thus, if the adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to use it, he rarely has to do so.

In the years since this wire was sent to Washington, Kennan has said more than once -- he is the author of twenty-six books -- that he was writing less about military containment than of political containment, but Washington officials did not see it that way in 1946. For those who wish to pursue Kennan further, he has written a new book published in 1996, At a Century's Ending: Reflections 1982-1995. It is a collection of his best thoughts; the State Department had found its intellectual moorings. Winston Churchill appeared in the United States as a guest, his Tory party having been defeated at the election polls less than a year after the war. His famous "Sinews of Peace" speech delivered on March 5, 1946, at Fulton, Missouri further fortified the ideologues at the State Department already primed by George Kennan. Here was a man who had negotiated with Joseph Stalin and led the West to victory in World War II. "I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war," he said. "What they do desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines." In a key paragraph of his speech, he said that From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitols of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, Belgrade, and Sofia, all these famous cities and the


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populations around them lie in the Soviet sphere and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and increasing measure of control from Moscow.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Stalin announced to a warweary Soviet public that at least five new Five-Year programs would be required before the nation could get back on its economic feet. Some 23 million Russians had died during the war, and Soviet industry had not even begun to convert to peacetime production. Stalin addressed the nation from a rather unlikely podium, the theater of the Bolshoi Ballet. There would be no relief from the grinding toil of the war years. Our [Communist] Party intends to organize a powerful new upsurge of the national economy which would enable us, for instance, to raise the level of our industry threefold, as compared with the prewar level; only under such conditions can we regard our country as guaranteed against any eventualities. That will require perhaps three new Five Year Plans, perhaps more.

The Soviet Union had lost 30 percent of its national wealth during the war, and 25 million people were still homeless. These figures suggest that Churchill was right when he told the audience at Fulton, Missouri that he did not believe that "Soviet Russia desired war," even though the Soviet armed forces were both intact and victorious. Still in 1947, President Truman had to deal with what seemed to be a Communist-inspired insurgency in Greece. This country had been occupied by Nazis until the British displaced them. During the occupation, peasants and farmers worked together in the Greek resistance led by people who were possibly Communists themselves. Truman took the position that an armed insurgency that threatened Greek stability also threatened lines of communications between the United States and its Middle East oil supply. So on March 12, 1947 Truman addressed a joint session of Congress. He offered economic aid to Greece and Turkey, both in desperate need of funds to rebuild war-shattered economies. Truman said in part that The very existence of the Greek state is today threatened by the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led by Communists, who defy the government's authority at a number of points, particularly along the northern boundaries...Meanwhile the Greek government is unable to cope with the situation. The Greek army is small and poorly equipped....No government is perfect. One of the chief virtues of a democracy, however, is that its defects are always visible and under democratic processes can be pointed out and corrected. The Greek government is not perfect. Nevertheless, it represents eighty-five percent of the members of the Greek Parliament who were chosen in an election last year. Foreign observers, including 692 Americans, considered this election to be a fair expression of the views of the Greek people.


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Thus, Congress agreed to support the Greek government with significant economic aid together with limited military support. What was done represented the Truman Doctrine, the first response to the need to restore democracy to countries occupied by an enemy during the war. Turkey also got some foreign aid, but this aid was probably a mistake even then. In 1974, bitter warfare broke out between Greek Cypriotes and Turkish troops that invaded Cyprus. The European Commission on Human Rights investigated the Greek allegations of torture and other violations of human rights and came down hard against Turkey for those violations in a long opinion. Harry Truman succeeded to the presidency on April 12, 1945. Since then he had had a full dinner plate of problems. Potsdam, the decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan, the development of a long range foreign policy -- containment -- for a State Department under Dean Acheson and the Truman Doctrine were just the first course. He had an upcoming election in 1948, the Marshall Plan involving economic aid to Europe devastated by war and in need of reconstruction, and the decision to proceed with development of the nuclear bomb and a delivery system capable of using them. Also, it was necessary to decide on the framework of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). During World War II, much of Europe was devastated by military forces on land and from the air. Dresden, Germany, for example, was firebombed almost out of existence by British bombers. So were other German cities. After American troops landed in Normandy on June 4, 1944 French villages suffered greatly. Philosophically, the French shrugged it all off with Gallic humor. "One can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs." However, entire industrial plants, rail delivery systems, and transportation hubs had been completely destroyed or damaged beyond repair. In Great Britain, food rationing continued for about five years after Germany's surrender, and the country needed repair after extensive damage from German bombs. Coventry, a British industrial city, had been almost wiped out. London itself had been seriously damaged, not only by bombs, but also by the V-1 and V-2 rockets launched by the Germans late in the war. So, in a speech at Harvard University, General George Marshall suggested what has since been referred to as the Marshall Plan of massive economic aid for those European countries requesting assistance in their reconstruction efforts. Initially, the Marshall Plan was humanitarian in that it supplied the farm implements, seeds and fertilizer that allowed French and German farmers to use their land more efficiently to grow food for local consumption. Each country receiving aid was requested to develop its own list of priorities, whether for industrial recoverey or agricultural selfsufficiency. American companies almost always filled the orders approved


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by Marshall Plan administrators in London and Washington. So, from an initially humanitarian role, economic aid shifted to industrial reconstruction. Actually, entire plants were occasionally shipped to Europe and re-assembled where they were to be used, e.g., an oil refinery. The list of European countries receiving this aid was not long. The Soviet Union told the central European countries like Hungary and Czechoslovkia they could not participate in Marshall Plan economic aid. There is little doubt that the Marshall Plan set the stage for substantial funds of corporate direct investment in Europe.Today, the Agency for International Development (AID) is the successor agency for funnelling funds to over eighty different countries as the president proposes and Congress approves. The first postwar crisis confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union occurred in Berlin on June 23, 1948. The Soviet Military Administration issued an order to close all rail traffic using a narrow zone about thirty miles long. The western zones with a population of 2.5 million people relied on rail traffic for all the coal and food brought into Berlin. General Lucuis Clay, in command of the American zone described the Soviet action as "one of the most ruthless efforts in modern times to use mass starvation for political coercion." Truman authorized an around-theclock airlift of supplies known as the Berlin Airlift. Finally, the Russians relented. However, this confrontation over a minor currency reform measure was the first confrontation of the Cold War. Truman succeeded to the presidency when Franklin Roosevelt died April 12, 1945. In 1948, Truman faced election as president. His Republican opponent was Thomas E. Dewey, formerly Governor of New York and relentless prosecutor of criminals as District Attorney for the City of New York. There was no television, only radio, but there was the railroad which Truman used on his whistle stop tour of the United States. Dewey had lost to Roosevelt in the 1944 election, and he was foreordained to lose to Truman four years later. Some 49 million voters went to the polls. Truman got 49.6 percent of the popular vote and 303 votes in the Electoral College to Dewey's 189 votes. Strom Thurmond ran as a States Rights candidate, and Henry Wallace ran as a Progressive Party candidate. Neither got more than token votes. In 1948, President Truman, almost alone in the Western world on the issue of Palestine, took a firm step in supporting Israel's statehood over bitter Arab protests. After World War I, the League of Nations established Great Britain as the Mandatory for Palestine, once part of the Ottoman Empire. In 1947, the British announced the termination of its mandate for Palestine. The United Nations, after considering various options, adopted Resolution 181 (II) partititioning Palestine into two states, one Jewish and the other an Arab state. The Jews accepted this partition, but the Arab


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world was adamantly opposed to it. On May 15, 1948 Egypt, Jordan and Syria attacked the nascent state of Israel in its War of Independence. The war ended in 1949 with Jordan in unlawful possession of the West Bank. On April 15, 1950 Jordan announced it was annexing the West Bank as an extension of its Hashemite Kingdom, an act in violation of international law. This was only one of the factors creating the foundation for continuing support of Israel by the United States. In 1949, President Truman had two major policy problems. One was China, renamed the Peoples' Republic of China, and the other was the decision to approve production of the nuclear bomb. Mao Tse-tung was now the ruler of all China except for Taiwan; the Chinese in Beijing consider Taiwan a province of theirs that will soon return home. Chou Enlai was Premier in 1960 when Edgar Snow visited China in that year after a long absence. Since 1949, Chiang Kai-shek had taken his gold out of China and used it to rule Taiwan. Members of the Kuomintang had left China with Chiang. In his book, The Other Side of the River: Red China Today, Snow described his visit with soldiers, peasants, workers, intellectuals, students, composers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, actors, and journalists. His Chinese was sufficiently fluent to get along without an interpreter, but no foreigner was permitted to travel in China without an Intourist guide who often doubled as an interpreter. His book was published by Random House in 1961, long after Mao had become ruler of all China. Snow wrote one entire chapter on the subject of "Why China Went Red." This chapter began with a quote from Dean Acheson, who was Secretary of State during the civil war in China. Dated July 30, 1949 Acheson said: "The unfortunate but inescapable fact is that the ominous result of the civil war in China was beyond the control of the government of the United States. Nothing that this country did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed that result; nothing that was left undone by this country has contributed to it. It was the product of internal Chinese forces, which this country tried to influence, but could not." Edgar Snow agreed with Acheson and wrote in Chapter 9: Contrary to opinion held in America, the Kuomintang never posed a clear moral alternative to the Communists but competed with them purely on the basis of an efficient use of force. For educated youths joining the Communists it was simply a matter of practical judgment whether their method was the only one which would provide a personal solution as well as quickly close the appalling industrial and scientific gaps between China and the advanced nations of the world. Those who became convinced of this in the early days made a discovery which confounded all previous Marxist theory. They discovered that they could bring the proletarian revolution to power without urban or proletarian insurrections.


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Unfortunately, what happens in China affects policies developed in Washington. Up until 1949, for example, the United States supported Chiang, arming his forces for use aginst Japan during World War II. This war was a joint effort, with Mao's forces also fighting Japan within China. In 1949, however, the United States rather than accept Beijing's invitation to recognize the new Communist reality in China, chose to continue its support of Chiang on Taiwan. Domestic political considerations within the United States would probably have prevented any other policy. California's Senator, William Knowland, a Republican, was a major spokesman of the Chinese lobby in Washington. President Truman and Congress also had to deal with the Soviet threat to the West in Europe. So the North Atlantic Treaty was negotiated, primarily with Great Britain and France with an American initiative. It was ratified by the Senate in 1949, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was born. 3 The Federal Republic of Germany was a member of NATO but by terms of the NATO treaty, could not use its own arms except in an armed attack against it by the Soviet Union. In Article 5 of the treaty, it was provided that "an armed attack against one or more of them [its parties] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all, and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the party or parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually, and in concert with the other parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area."

Over time, the United States maintained the lion's share of NATO troops in Europe and at a huge cost essentially as a defense of Germany against an armed attack by the Soviet Union. The formation of NATO appears to have been motivated less by an expectation that Stalin's forces might attack Western Europe than by fear of a neutralist European third force, a short cut to suicide.Without American troops in Germany, Russia's Red Army could occcupy Western Europe. Policy planners in Washington, including Dean Acheson and perhaps George Kennan wanted to be certain that American power would be projected to reflect the new policy of containment of Communism. The Soviet Union responded to NATO by organizing the Warsaw Pact forces, principally East Germany, Poland and the forces of central European nations all armed by the Soviet Union. The immediate postwar period was dominated by an anti-Communist atmosphere. Members of Congress, being politicians, sensed that the voters feared Communism then, as much as they fear crime today. During


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World War II, the Soviet Union had plenty of agents spying for them, and Stalin, at Potsdam, knew all about the two atomic bombs to be dropped on Japan. His spies had gathered enough information from a few Americans to make fairly accurate parts for the use of the Russians working along parallel lines in Moscow. On August 29, 1949 the Soviet Union tested its own atomic bomb in Kazakhstan. On August 12, 1953 its scientists tested the first Russian thermonuclear weapon. Klaus Fuchs, himself a highly experienced nuclear physicist, performed one last act of espionage at Los Alamos. On June 13, 1946 he reviewed all the archives on thermonuclear weapons design. These were then passed on to Moscow. Fuchs and a few Americans did incalculable damage. They made it possible for the Soviet Union to produce its own nuclear weapons within a time span shortened by as much as two years. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted and executed for their part in this espionage. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Petitioners v. United States, 346 U.S. 273 (1953).They were both indicted for conspiring to commit espionage in wartime in violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. A jury found them guilty and they were sentenced to death. Upon appeal, the verdict was affirmed at 195 F2nd 583 (2nd Cir. 1952), and a petition for rehearing was denied. In its per curiam opinion. the Supreme Court also held that the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 operated with retrospective effect. Anti-Communist hysteria reached levels previously unimaginable in 1950. In that year, Congress enacted the Internal Security Act over President Truman's veto. Known as the McCarran Act after Nevada's Senator Pat McCarran, the statute ordered Communists to register with the attorney general; the Subversive Activities Control Board was created to administer the registration process. After eleven years of litigation, the Supreme Court finally upheld the registration provisions of the Act. Communist Party v. Subversive Activities Control Board, 367 U.S. 1 (1961). Chief Justice Warren, Justices Black, Douglas, and Brennan dissented. On the same day, the Court affirmed the conviction of Junius Scales for being a member of the Communist Party with knowledge of its purpose. Scales v. United States, 367 U.S. 203 (1961). Scales was convicted under a provision of the Smith Act. A provision of the Smith Act made it a crime "for any person knowingly to combine, conspire, or agree with any other person to perform any act which would substantially contribute to the establishment within the United States of a totalitarian dictatorship...the direction or control of which is to be vested in, or exercised by or under the domination or control of, any foreign government, foreign organization or foreign individual..." The same four justices dissented in Scales. Section 2 of the McCarran Act recited legislative findings based on evidence adduced before several Congressional committees. The first of these was: "There exists a world Communist movement which in its origins, its development and its present


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practices, is a world-wide revolutionary movement whose purpose it is, by treachery, deceit, infiltration into other groups (governmental and otherwise, espionage, sabotage, terrorism, and by any other means deemed necessary, to establish a Communist totalitarian dictatorship in the countries throughout the world through the medium of a world-wide Communist organization." The objectives attributed to the Soviet Union as stated in this finding were almost completely impossible. As George Kennan wrote in 1989, "After the success of the Marshall Plan in 1948, there could no longer be any question of dangerous communist penetration in the [Western Europe] region. Both sides, furthermore, soon began to learn to live, after a fashion, with the nuclear weapon, at least in the sense that they came to recognize that this was a suicidal weapon that must never be used -- that any attempt to use it would lead only to a disaster in which all concepts of victory or defeat would become meaningless." In enacting subversive control laws, Congress was using the politics of fear for domestic political purposes. While extracting this text from the act itself required access to a law library, the general public was treated to radio and newspaper reports of this overheated rhetoric on an almost daily basis. Attempts to penalize membership in the Communist Party were not limited to Congress. Konigsberg v. State Bar of California, 366 U.S. 36 (1961). However, before all this anti-Communist hysteria, civil liberties fared well. On June 17, 1957, the Supreme Court overturned the contempt citation of a man who had refused to answer some some questions put to him by the House UnAmerican Acticities Committee (HUAC); Watkins v. United States, 354 U.S. 178 (1957). In Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 235 (1957), the court imposed constitutional constraints on investigations conducted by state legislatures; in Service v. Dulles, 354 U.S. 363 (1957) the court ordered the reinstatement of an alleged security risk; and in Yates v. United States, 354 U.S. 298 (1957), the court reversed the convictions of California Communist leaders. On March 25, 1947 President Truman brought his Cold War home to America. He signed Executive Order 9835 launching the Federal Employees Loyalty Program, the most sweeping loyalty inquiry in the nation's history. According to Red Scare, some 26,000 persons were referred to loyalty boards for investigation, and nearly 13,000 interrogatories and letters of charge were issued, often on the basis of flimsy and hearsay evidence. In 1953, President Eisenhower revoking one executive order and issuing Executive Order 10450 establishing a new and expanded loyalty program. Both allowed the Attorney General to list all organizations he considered subversive. There was no appeal from his decision, nor was any pre-listing required. In Peters v Hobby, 349 U.S.


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331 (1955), Peters was the victim of a so-called post audit undertaken by the loyalty review board. He sued Secretary Oveta Culp Hobby for a declaratory judgment that his removal on loyalty grounds was invalid. The Supreme Court agreed the post audit hearing was invalid. In his concurring opinion, Justice Black thought "the order and others like it embody a broad, far-reaching espionage program over federal employees." Justice Black considered the entire program as an unlawful delegation of power by the executive. Despite the hysteria generated by the late and unlamented Senator Joseph McCarthy (Rep. Wisc.), the Supreme Court acted rationally in Peters v. Hobby, 349 U.S. 331 (1955). It reinstated federal employees discharged under the loyaly-security program. In Cole v. Young, 351 U.S. 536 (1956), the court overturned the conviction of a Communist leader for violation of a state sedition law. Lest this dark period in history be forgotten, here's what the Red Scare generated according to Griffin Fariello's Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition: State and federal investigators grilled suspected citizens on the reading habits, voting patterns, and church attendance. Support of racial equality became evidence of subversive leaning. Heretical literature was banned from public and school libraries; some communities even held book burnings. Hollywood scoured its films for the subversive taint. Neighbors informed on neighbors, students on their teachers. Readers of 'questionable' works hid their leftists tomes or buried them in the back yard. Seven war-era concentration camps were dusted off, and lists prepared for the radicals to fill them.

Joseph McCarthy began his reign of political terror in 1950. Elected to the Senate in 1946, McCarthy was something of a non-entity until February, 1950. It was at a political rally in Wheeling, West Virginia that he stumbled on his cause. According to the local newspaper, the Wheeling Intelligencer he told people present at the rally that "I have here in my hand a list of 205 people who were known to the Secretary of State [George Marshall] as being members of the Communist Party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping policy of the State Department." But McCarthy got it wrong. Soviet spies like Kim Philby told Moscow what Washington was doing. Philby and three colleagues at Cambridge University were recruited by Moscow in the mid-1930s and collectively did more damage to both British and American interests than any other spies, including Klaus Fuchs and Aldrich Ames. In fact, Philby served as MI6's chief liaison with the Central Intelligence Agency. It was not until 1963 that Philby, evidently tipped off by a colleague, fled Beirut, Lebanon for Moscow, only steps ahead of a CIA hit team. This closed the door on the Soviet Union's most successful penetration ever of Western


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intelligence at the very highest levels of government. McCarthy never knew of this penetration and blamed State Department personnel indiscriminately for the CIA's negligence. A confluence of events made McCarthy's timing propitious. Klaus Fuchs was arrested as a Soviet spy. Alger Hiss was tried and convicted of perjury, and Judith Coplon was arrested and charged with espionage. The Hiss case launched an obscure California member of the House, Richard Nixon, on a political career that led him to the White House in 1968. Nixon was President Eisenhower's Vice President from 1952 to 1960. China went its own way in 1949 after Chiang fled to Taiwan. McCarthy never offered convincing evidence of these outrageous charges, but they were none the less unsettling to people familiar with loyalty programs and subversive activity. His shrill denunciations dominated public life for the next five years, and neither he nor his Senate committee, the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Committee on Government Operations ever produced a bona fide Communist or even turned any charges to the Department of Justice for prosecution. Finally, the Senate Army hearings were his undoing. He was censured by the Senate and died unmourned two years later. He did leave one indelible definition behind. This one appears on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary. Mc•Car•thy•ism n.1. the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, esp. of proCommunist activity, in many instances unsupported by proof or based on slight, doubtful, or irrelevant evidence. 2. the practice of making unfair allegations or using unfair investigative techniques, esp. in order to restrict dissent or political criticism. [1950, Amer.; after J. R.McCarthy; see -ISM]

While President Truman was in office, he became heavily committed to establishing the rule of law in international affairs. Korea, occupied by Japan for thirty-five years, was liberated after World War II and divided into North Korea ruled by a Communist dictatorship. South Korea was created south of the 38th parallel. It was ruled by that arch-conservative Syngman Rhee. There had been threats and counter-threats between the two Koreas, and on June 25, 1950 the North Korean army moved across the 38th parrallel to invade South Korea in violation of Article 2 (4) of the United Nations Charter. Truman appealed to the Security Council and it effectively converted American armed forces in the region to UN forces authorized to conduct a police action to restore the status quo. General Douglas MacArthur was placed in charge of this UN action, but he didn't completely follow orders. After pushing the North Korean forces north of the 38th parrallel, MacArthur went further pursuing them all the way to the Yalu River and provoking Chinese armed forces to act in self-defense. Finally, an armistice was signed, and the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) was


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established at the 38th parrallel. But that didn't happen until 1953, when Dwight Eisenhower was elected president. However, Harry Truman was still president when the United Steelworkers of America announced it would go out on strike, all mediation efforts having failed. Truman saw the threat of a national steel strike as denying essential weapons to American forces in Korea. Accordingly, Truman issued Executive Order 10340 authorizing his Secretary of Commerce to seize and operate the steel mills as government operations. The Supreme Court rejected this completely. Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, as Secretary of Commerce, 343 U.S. 579 (1952). Writing for the Court, Justice Black said: "The President's power, if any, to issue the order must stem either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself. There is no statute that expressly authorizes the President to take possession of property as he did here. Nor is there any act of Congress to which our attention has been directed from which such a power can fairly be implied." The order was declared invalid by a unanimous court with four separate concurring opinions. In 1952, President Truman decided he would not seek reelection as president, so the Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson, once the Governor of Illinois as its candidate. In Chicago, amidst internecine battles between the forces of conservative Senator Robert Taft of Ohio and the pro-Eisenhower forces, the Republicans nominated Dwight Eisenhower, the hero of the crusade in Europe against Nazi Germany. In November, 1952 some 61.5 million voters went to the polls. Eisenhower got 55.1 percent of the popular vote and 442 electoral votes. Stevenson got only 89 electoral votes with 44.4 percent of the popular vote.

By 1952, the United States had gone through a tumultuous twelve years from 1940 to the date Dwight D. Eisenhower was sworn in as president on January 20, 1953. World War II was behind Americans and the demoguguery of the late Truman years from politicians like Senator McCarthy (Rep. Wisc.) and Senator William Jenner (Rep. Ind.) was on the horizon. Eisenhower's Vice President Richard Nixon (Rep. Calif.) had earned his spurs as a demogogue in the 1950 campaign against Helen Gahagen Douglas, the Pink Lady he defeated in the California elections of that year. She was no more a Communist than Nixon himself.


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dem•a•gogue n., v., -gogued, -gogu˜ing -- n.1. a person, esp. an orator or political leader, who gains power and popularity by arousing the emotions, passions, and prejudices of the people. 2. (in ancient times) a leader of the people. -- v.t.3. to treat or manipulate (a political issue) in the manner of a demagogue; obscure or distort with emotionalism, prejudice, etc. -- v.i.4. to speak or act like a demagogue.

Eisenhower gave the public what it wanted -- freedom from public concerns -- at least for two years. Eisenhower also gave the public the feeling matters were in his capable hands, the hands that had directed the Allies in a successful war against Nazi Germany and Italian Fascism. His Secretary of State was John Foster Dulles, his brother, Allan Dulles was Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, created a few years earlier to replace the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) . Eisenhower had kept his campaign promise by settling the Korean War albeit with some 40,000 American armed forces stationed south of the DMZ. They are still there. The Strategic Air Command (SAC) was in the demonic hands of General Curtis LeMay who was satirized in the great film Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Nuclear Bomb. LeMay should have been court-martialed for insubordination. He was reluctant to and even opposed to Eisenhower's wait-and-see policies. When LeMay was asked in 1962 what he would do in Vietnam he replied "I'd bomb them back to the stone age." The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) established the firm principle of civilian control of nuclear weapons, but the policy didn't quite work out the way Congress intended, at least not while General LeMay was still around. His SAC was authorized to plan for preemption -- for beating the Soviet forces to the punch if intelligence indicated they were beginning a first strike against the United States. The CIA was entrusted with the virtually impossible task of determining when the Soviet Union began assembling its nuclear weapons, and it estimated a month's lead time would be enough. LeMay had other plans. He believed that with simultaneous attacks from three sides; the SAC could deliver some 800 nuclear weapons and destroy Russia before any of their aircraft could even get off the ground. In 1954, neither side had intercontinental ballistic missiles, so air power was the weapon of choice. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb by Richard Rhodes published in 1995 is recommended reading for those who would have been terrified by what LeMay wanted to do, had they known of this critical doomsday debate behind closed doors. Not everything was secret enough to debate behind closed doors. Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance was lifted by the Atomic Energy


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Commission headed by Eisenhower's appointee as its chairman, Lewis Strauss in 1953. There was a hearing that filled some 800 pages of hearing transcript. The prosecution had evidence from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI that Oppenheimer's attorney was not allowed to see. There were other irregularities, but the lifting of Oppenhermer's security was lifted, and Edward Teller's testimony against his colleague was possibly the key. The entire sorry episode split the scientific community. He had opposed development of the nuclear bomb, and that was enough for Lewis Strauss. In the same year, the House was getting into high gear for the nationally televised Army-McCarthy hearing. Television was really still in its infancy, but Edward R. Murrow of radio fame was a war correspondent in London for CBS. In the early 1950s, CBS offered Murrow and his colleage Fred Friendly a new television program, "See It Now." They did some fine television reporting from Washington or Korea or wherever the news was, and "See It Now" became one of the early news shows backed by the expanding reach of CBS television. During the Army-McCarthy hearings, Murrow put his career on the line to speak out against what is now referred to as McCarthyism. CBS itself had retreated from the political front in some respects. In 1950, it had required its employees to sign loyalty oaths and blacklisted some performing artists as security risks because of their political views. Murrow was uncompromising on "See It Now:" We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in to our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, or from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and defend causes which were for the moment unpopular...We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and have given considerable comfort to enemies, and whose fault is that? Not really his, he didn't create the situation of fear, he merely exploited it and rather successfully. Cassius was right. 'The fault dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in your stars.'

According to Jeff Kisseloff's book, The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961, CBS was so fearful of political fallout from this program, it refused to advertise it. The program was cancelled by CBS. However in 1954 the country had other problems. A year earlier, the Supreme Court held that the Montgomery, Alabama rules requiring segregation in buses were unconstitutional. Rosa Parks, the first black women to refuse to move to the back of the bus was vindicated, and the Montgomery bus boycott was settled with the participation of a young black minister, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Desegregation of restaurants and other public facilities required a great deal of courage from otherwise obscure people over a period of years.


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On May 17, 1954 the Supreme Court held in a unanimous opinion that separate but equal public school facilities in the United States were inherently unequal. Brown v. Topeka, Kansas Board of Education (I) 347 U.S. 483 (1954). Giving interested school officials a year to develop an approach, the Supreme Court issued its order to the states to "proceed with all deliberate speed" to desegregate the nation's public schools. Brown v. Board of Education (II) 349 U.S. 294 (1955). These cases didn't reach the Court by levitation; it took real courage in the white South to make a simple request, a bus to transport black children to school in Summerton, South Carolina. Even so, a black college-educated minister, J. A. DeLaine, ran the risk of losing his job as a school teacher during the week if he continued trying to get a bus. Finally, he filed a class action in the U.S. District Court in Columbia, South Carolina. This challenge to the all-white public schools was heard by a three-judge panel with Judges Parker and Dobie as Circuit judges and Judge Timmerman. Plaintiffs were denied an injunction abolishing segregation. Briggs v. Elliott, 103 F. Supp. 920 (ED S.Carolina 1952) and took a direct appeal to the Supreme Court where it was reversed and remanded to the District Court for further action consistent with Brown v. Board of Education (I). Briggs v. Elliott, 349 U.S. 295 (1955). Davis v. County School Board Prince Edward County, Virginia decided in 1951 was still another of those cases leading to Brown v. Board of Education. Black students wanted facilities equal to those for white students. After a trial before Dobie, and two Virginia District Court Judges, the court held segregation in Virginia schools rested on the mores and traditions of the South. The Attorney General of Virginia argued that segregation was "morally and legally defensible," This decision was reversed and sent back to the District Court for further proceedings. Brown v. Board of Education had another fortuitous feature. The Supreme Court expressly overruled Plessy v. Ferguson decided in 1896. By 1956, television had reached out to cover more news than ever. Consequently, the entire nation could see the explosion of anger in Little Rock, Arkansas. Governor Orval Faubus had scarcely mentioned the race issue during the election campaign in which he was reelected. The courtordered desegregation plan began with high schools. Initially, only nine black students were selected for admission to high school. Labor Day, 1957 was the day the rednecks of Little Rock went ballistic in their anger at desegregation, and they took it out on nine teen-agers who only cared about school. John Chancellor, a relatively junior NBC reporter was in Little Rock and got it all on film. President Eisenhower had failed to provide any sort of moral leadership, but there was national television doing it for him. A white mob encouraged by a state governor was tormenting nine black children who only wanted to go to school. Eisenhower was finally driven to send the 101st Airborne to stabilize a


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situation where rioting had become more widespread. But every evening of this crisis saw Chancellor on television and the Little Rock rednecks saw themselves and they knew the images projected nationally were making them look like what they were, an angry, hate-filled mob on the brink of anarchy in Little Rock. Eisenhower had no real choice; he had to send troops or be found guilty of allowing terrorism in the court of public opinion. Harry Ashmore, then the editor of the Arkansas Gazette was with Chancellor watching the story unfold when both got the news that Russia had launched Sputnick orbiting overhead. The Russians were the first in space, and no one knew then what this scientific success might mean for the future. Reaction was not long in surfacing. The nation's schools had to be improved with special emphasis on components of the science and math curriculum. In 1955, Harper & Row, now HarperCollins, published a book by Rudolf Flesch entitled Why Johnny Can't Read: And What You Can Do About It. Suddenly, it began to sell nationally. It's still a strong backlist book. In the meantime, Eisenhower designated the Navy to build a rocket for use in launching a satellite. Werner von Braun had already designed the Redstone and objected strenuously to this diversion of funds and talent from his work in Huntsville, Alabama. Charles Wilson, Secretary of Defense -- "What's good for General Motors," he testified at his confirmation hearing," was good for the country" -- wanted nice tidy defense systems he could understand. And Eisenhower had the answer to Sputnik, photo reconnaissance, the U-2, a spy aircraft that was to get Eisenhower in trouble in 1960. Then in 1959, Bernard Brodie of the Rand Corporation wrote a book, Strategy in the Missile Age, published by the Princeton University Press. Brodie talked about the future and missiles under development, like the Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman missiles. The latter were finally installed in silos around the country. But Brodie was really talking about airpower -- the B-52 -- as a delivery system for nuclear weapons. In the meantime, Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, invented the policy of massive retaliation, a policy he later thought might have gone too far. In 1978, Herman Kahn wrote On Thermonuclear War published by Greenwood Press. Civilians who read this book were horrified by the possibilities so dispassionately discussed by Kahn. One thermonuclear blast with New York City at ground zero would kill over three million people. Followed as it was by the end of the Vietnam War, Kahn may have added a new anti-war dimension to the American culture. In any case, Eisenhower was caught flatfooted by Sputnik and had no real understanding of its potential. The Little Rock, Arkansas school desegregation case surfaced once more in 1958, almost a year after President Eisenhower had ordered the 101st Airborne withdrawn. John Chancellor, it turned out, had had an informant within the high school, an unnamed student. On the basis of


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what he learned and told David Halberstam, this fine writer added a new dimension of hate and fear to the Little Rock integration case in his book, The Fifties published by Fawcett Columbine in 1993: After a few weeks, with the situation seemingly under control, the government pulled out the 101st and put the federalized Arkansas National Guard in charge. With that, the situation began to deteriorate. The mob was no longer a problem, but inside the school there was a systematic and extremely wellorganized assault on the nine children by high-school-age segregationists. They not only harrassed the black children but, more effectively, any white child who was courteous or friendly to them. It was a calculated campaign (organized, school officials suspected, right out of the governor's mansion). The school bullies behaving like youthful Klansmen, knew they had behind them the full power of the state ggovernment and the increasingly defiant Arkansas population. That meant the job of protecting the nine fell on a handful of teachers and administrators in the school. The nine students were in for a very hard and ugly year. There was a relentless assault on them -kicking, tripping, hitting them from behind, harrassing them with verbal epithets as they walked down the hall, pouring hot soup on them in the cafeteria. Their lockers were broken into regularly and their books stolen. The school administrators knew exactly who the ringleaders were but found them boastfully proud.

No one should believe for one second that this ugly scene was recreated out of information from a student informant. The record in Cooper v. Aaron, 163 F. Supp. 13 (CD Ark. 1958) shows beyond any doubt that Halberstam's description was accurate. There, the School Board applied for suspension of the integration, alleging the school was out of control. The District Court agreed and ordered a suspension for 2 1/2 years. The Court of Appeals reversed, at 257 F.2nd 33, and the Supreme Court affirmed. Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U.S. 1 (1958). And there is still another aspect of this defiance of law by Governor Faubus. Faubus v. United States, 254 F.2nd 797 (8th Cir. 1957). In that case, the United States asked for and obtained an order enjoining Faubus and the National Guard from preventing the nine children from entering the school. At no time did Eisenhower condemn the Arkansas obstruction of justice and contempt for the law shown by so many people in Arkansas. In 1960, Eisenhower was constitutionally barred from a third term. However, he spent a great deal of time and effort with staff and close friends suggesting candidates other than Nixon. One reporter asked Eisenhower what major idea Nixon had contributed to his administration. Eisenhower's response was, "Give me a week and I'll think of one." In fact, Eisenhower and Nixon did not like each other at all, at least not until Julie Nixon married Eisenhower's son. The president had cautioned Nixon about denouncing communism, corruption, controls, and Korea at a time


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Eisenhower was trying to get the Democrats in Congress to vote for his programs. In May, 1960 Gary Powers was shot down over Russia while flying the U-2 photo reconnaissance plane. Eisenhower was publicly embarrassed by this incident. Khruschev retaliated by cancelling a meeting in Moscow to discuss pressing problems involving a reduction in nuclear weapons. Then, in the fall, Nixon and John F. Kennedy held the nationally televised debates, the first on foreign policy and the second debate on domestic policy. To observers, Nixon "lost" the first debate because of fatigue and his "five o'clock shadow" picked up by the television cameras. In both debates, Nixon had to defend the Eisenhower record, and it was difficult even for a skilled debater to labor under this handicap. In any case, the election in November was close. Kennedy got 49.7 percent of the popular vote and 303 electoral votes to Nixon's 49.4 percent of the popular vote and 219 electoral votes. In 1962, Nixon tried to make a return to public life by running for Governor of California. He lost this race and made perhaps one of the most famous exit lines in political history at a press conference when he was tired and hung over: "You won't have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference."

It was a harsh, snowy day on January 20, 1961 in Washington, D.C. A bystander on Connecticut Avenue pointed out to spectators three Rolls Royce limousines that had suddenly come to a stop. While no one knew what the problem was, the three drivers did know. Their batteries were dead from creeping along at a snail's pace with heaters at full blast. The passengers and the spectators were all there for the same reason. At noon, John F. Kennedy would be the next President of the United States. Promptly at noon, Chief Justice Earl Warren, having sworn in Lyndon B. Johnson as Vice President, administered the constitutional oath to Kennedy. Robert Frost, looking a little frail, read some of his poetry. Kennedy's Inaugural Address was memorable for several reasons, as he himself noted: The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe-the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God. We dare not forget today that


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we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and to foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans -- born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage -- and unwillingness to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the globe. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe in order to assure the survival and success of liberty...And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Kennedy was the first president of this century and the last century to be under forty-eight upon becoming president For those young people who had worked so hard to elect Kennedy, the Inaugural festivities represented a magical moment in time. But then the work began in the White House. One of his most successful early programs was the Peace Corps. In a slightly different form, it exists today in 1995. In his inaugural address, Kennedy made no reference to civil rights, an omission that prompted James (Scotty) Reston of The New York Times to write in part: "...this week in his news conference he refused to carry out his promise to bar discrimination in government-insured housing....He is not spoiling for a fight with the Southern conservatives over civil rights..." It was a subject he could not ignore for long. In 1961, Sam Bailey, a black citizen of Mississippi filed suit in the United States District Court alleging that segregation of public transportation by rail and bus was a violation of the Constitution. Bailey v. Patterson, 199 F. Supp. 595 (ED Miss. 1961). The three-judge court held it should abstain from ruling on the law and directed Bailey to get whatever relief he could in the Mississippi state courts. On a direct appeal, the Supreme Court said that "We have settled beyond question that no State may require segregation of interstate or intrastate transportation (citations omitted). Nor was a three-judge court permissible, so the court vacated the judgment and remanded the case for expeditous disposition. Baily v. Patterson, 369 U. S. 31 (1962). Civil rights were not Kennedy's only concern. Soon after his Inauguration, President Kennedy agreed the United States should proceed with the Bay of Pigs operation, using Cuban refugees trained by the CIA. The entire affair was a complete disaster as a military operation, and it made even Fidel Castro look as though he had successfully defeated an invasion of Cuba by American troops. To his credit, Kennedy took full responsibility for a fiasco at the outset of his administration, but he expressed remorse only because amateurish adventurism against Communist Cuba had failed. However, Walt Rostow, then part of the National Security Council, gave Kennedy another option.


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It permitted the president to project American military power in the Far East, Communist Vietnam. In all the books published about Vietnam, there appeared no suggestion from the CIA that China would intervene in Vietnam militarily to defeat any American effort to save its corrupt regime or even to come to the assistance of Ho Chi Minh, were Hanoi to be threatened. However, another crisis intervened before any firm decisions were made about intervention in South Vietnam, the Cuban missile crisis in the fall of 1962. The Cuban missile crisis was something else, far more critical in the sense that the use of nuclear weapons was possible. Furthermore, Cuba was only 90 miles from Miami, while South Vietnam was 8,000 miles from Washington. Russia's premier had underestimated the new president's resolve after their first meeting in Vienna. Khruschev had shipped nuclear-tipped missiles to Cuba, and their presence was detected by photo reconnaissaance. Evidently, Khruschev wanted to match the Jupiter missile the United States had deployed to Turkey on the border of the Soviet Union. By October, 1962 Kennedy, with photos of the missile installations in Cuba condemned the secret bases and announced a quarantine of Cuba. On the evening of his televised address, aircraft of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) had taken off on assigned missions with nuclear weapons, and the United States military had gone to DefCon3, an alert status close to hostilities with either Cuba or the Soviet Union. General Thomas Power was SAC commander, having replaced General Curtis LeMay. Without presidential authorization, General Power effectively told the Russians that SAC was "in an advanced state of readiness." Even worse, an unsanctioned incident occurred with the launch from Kwajalein of an Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile on a test. It was a thoughtless provocation, particularly since the military had gone to DefCon2. Kennedy's quarantine worked, and the crisis passed narrowly missing a nuclear war had the president followed the advice of the hawks, like LeMay. He wanted to wipe out Cuban missile bases and use SAC to deliver megatons of nuclear power against Russia if it even tried to retaliate.

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According to Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, millions of Americans would have been killed in such an exchange; the Russians had medium range nuclear-tipped weapons in Cuba with authority to use them in the hands of a Soviet officer. According to an unnamed SAC commander, SAC bombers deliberately flew past their turnaround points toward Soviet airspace, an unambiguous threat certain to be picked up by Soviet radar. These bombers only changed course when Soviet freighters bound for Cuba with missiles stopped dead in the water, finally returning to the Soviet Union. The American crisis management team included the new Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara and Kennedy's brother, Robert Kennedy. He was Attorney General of the United States. Less than a year earlier, Kennedy had his first brush with Vietnam fallout. He told a reporter we should be sending more troops to Vietnam, noting the antiCommunism feature of such an idea. In his new book, Once Upon a Distant War, William Prochnau makes the early days of the war in Vietnam seem lightly confusing.The U. S. Ambassador Frederick Nolting had been instructed by Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State, not to give the press any more than routine information concerning current military information. An American carrier, the USS Core had arrived in Saigon with forty helicopters on deck. It had to steam up the river for almost thirty miles before unloading its cargo. This huge carrier, according to Prochnau, was perfectly visible to the Vietcong, their spies in Saigon and hundreds of spectators lining the river. Within days of its arrival, North Vietnam's Radio Hanoi had broadcast not only the numbers and type of helicopters but their serial numbers as well. Also heard on the news from Hanoi was word that hundreds of American servicemen had debarked from the carrier on December 11, 1961. Sending these soldiers to Saigon was clearly a violation of the Geneva Accords. This agreement among other things had divided Vietnam in to two areas in 1954, North Vietnam and South Vietnam. There were U.S. advisers in Saigon sent there by President Eisenhower,but the government in Washington concealed the fact that American soldiers were even present in Vietnam. Eisenhower even sent a letter dated October 23, 1954, not long after the humiliating defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu. Retrieved from Internet, his letter was addressed to President of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem. "The purpose of this letter," Eisenhower wrote, " [was] to assist the Government of Vietnam in developing and maintaining a strong, viable state capable of resisting attempted subversion or aggression through military means. The Government of the United States expects that aid [from the United States] will be met by performance on the part of the Government of Vietnam in undertaking needed reforms. It hopes that such aid, combined with your own continuing efforts, will contribute effectively toward an independent Vietnam endowed with a strong Government...." Then on December 14,


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1961 President Kennedy also sent a letter to Ngo Dinh Diem retrieved from Internet as a State Department Bulletin. The first paragraph read as follows: I have received your recent letter in which you described so cogently the dangerous conditions caused by North Vietnam's efforts to take over your country. The situation in your embattled country is well known to me and to the American people. We have been deeply disturbed by the assault on your country. Our indignation has mounted as the deliberate savagery of the Communist programs of assassination, kidnapping, and wanton violence became clear.... At that time [of the Geneva Accords of 1954] the United States although not a party to the Accords declared that it "would view any renewal of the aggression in violation of the Agreements with grave concern and as seriously threatening international peace and security." In accordance with that declaration,...we are prepared to help the Republic of Vietnam to protect its people and preserve its independence. We shall promptly increase our assistance to your defense effort...

The arrival of military advisers in Vietnam followed rapidly by arms for the troops of the Republic of Vietnam was probably the beginning of American armed forces involvment in the quagmire of Vietnam. The arrival of a carrier plus helicopters was probably one of the first overt steps in furtherance of a policy that increasingly required rationalization from Washington, i.e. lies. This was the first policy to have its cover blown by the press, but it was a foolish policy. It was also delusional on the part of generals and admirals in Saigon. American officials refused to confirm or deny the most obvious facts. So the press had to scramble for other sources. With the passage of time, press sources became more reliable than official sources, the first steps in a growing public awareness of a government willing to lie about its conduct in another country. In 1961, television was difficult to use productively in Vietnam. The equipment was too heavy and cameramen had trouble carrying it. In time, however, television became easier to use for news, and film from Vietnam began to appear on television. President Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated on November 2, 1963 by military coup leaders vying for power. His death exposed the myth of an independent democratic South Vietnam. From that point on, the United States had to operate through a succession of military dictators. They were unable to carry on a war in which South Vietnamese soldiers were increasingly unwilling to fight at all despite American military advisers' efforts to encourage them to resist "Communist aggression" from Hanoi. This meant that more and more Americans had to be drafted in the United States and sent to Vietnam in a war that became increasingly unpopular in the United States. The anti-Vietnam movement peaked in 1968, the year Johnson decided he would not seek reelection. Johnson had nade himself


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deeply unpopular by pursuing a war that itself had become deeply unpopular. On patrol in Phuoc Tuy Province, June 1966 After receiving a fresh supply of food and ammunition flown in by helicopter, men of the US 173rd Airborne Brigade continue on a jungle "Search and Destroy" patrol.

On November 22, 1963 President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. He was murdered by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. This event deeply shocked the entire nation as nothing before this terrible event had ever done. Kennedy, his wife Jacqueline Kennedy, and the men around him had created a belief in the historical myth of Camelot as the heart of a new culture. Had he lived another year, he and his wife would surely have invited the Beatles to sing at the White House as so many artists, and other famous people had already appeared. The Beatles appeared on the first American tour beginning in February, 1964. These four Liverpudlians, Paul McCartny, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr were greeted in New York by an ecstatic audience of young and older people stunned by the originality and verve of their music, most of it original. Beatlemania became a phenomonon of American culture and is currently undergoing a revival of three Beatles -- John Lennon was shot and killed in New York. But in 1964 to 1970 (when the Beatles went their own ways), the songs were of love, peace, and understanding. They did as much with their music and lyrics as any one could to raise the level of protest against the Vietnam War. The Beatles got their start in the United States -- even though their reputation preceded them -- with three appearances on Ed Sullivan's television show. Seventy-three million people were estimated to have watched their first show on February 9, 1964. The Beatles soon evolved into leading figures of the 1960s counterculture, putting to music a philosophy of love, peace, spiritual exploration, and social change, the very opposite of what was happening outside their world of music. Some people even credit the Beatles with creating a musical culture that allowed the anti-war environment to flourish. Had President Kennedy survived, he would certainly have invited the Beatles to appear in the White House, perpetuating the myth of Camelot.


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With Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon B. Johnson succeeded to the presidency. Vietnam was expanding to reach more Americans via the draft. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who served under Kennedy stayed on and served in the same capacity for President Johnson. On February 27, 1965 the State Department issued its "Aggression from the North:" the State Department's White Paper on Vietnam. Retrieved from the Internet, its language had become more bellicose than ever: South Vietnam is fighting for its life against a brutal campaign of terror and armed attack inspired, directed, supplied and controlled by the Communist regime in Hanoi. This flagrant aggression has been going on for years, but recently the pace has quickened and the threat has become more acute....The people of South Vietnam have chosen to resist this threat. At their request, the United States has taken its place beside them in their defensive struggle.

As one observer noted, there was no evidence that any member of the Vietcong ever read any Marx or Lenin, or understood either. The entire Vietnam War began as a misguided attempt to support France's colonial policy after World War II. Between the date of the White Paper in 1965 and 1968, the level of protest within the United States had reached a level that made Johnson realize, he could not successfully run for reelection in 1968. Accordingly, he made an announcement to that effect. Johnson, however, did make significant contributions in the field of civil rights. Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It is questionable whether Kennedy could have done as well; the 1960 election had been so close that Kennedy would have needed votes in the Senate that only Johnson could deliver. Furthermore, the political landscape had been radically changed by Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962). This case opened the federal courts to urban interests that had been unable to force state legislators to reapportion state legislatures or to redistrict Congressional seats to reflect the increasingly urbanized United States. The litigation in the field of redistricting was destined to and did lead to more litigation that has still not finally decided questions of, for example, drawing district lines to provide safe districts from which to elect black Americans to Congress. Like the massive resistance in the South to desegregation in the nation's public schools, redistricting would continue in both areas. In 1955 at the time of the Montgomery bus boycott, a new voice unmistakeably Southern in origin was heard. Martin Luther King, Jr., the newly installed pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, galvanized and mobilized a following. He eloquently described Brown v. Board of Education (II):


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If we are wrong -- the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong -- God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong -- Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer and never came down to earth! If we are wrong -- justice is a lie And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

The Southern Manifesto was signed in the same year by governors of the South who called for massive resistance to the court's opinion in Brown v. Board of Education. This manifesto declared that the justices "with no legal basis for such action," had proceeded "to exercise their naked judicial power and substituted their personal political and social ideas for the established law of the land." Uninvited "outside agitators" were "threatening immediate and revolutionary changes" that would "destroy the system of public education" and "the dual system of government which has enabled us to achieve our greatness." Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on the moral high ground, while George Wallace, not yet elected Governor of Alabama believed enthusiastically in the venom of the Southern Manifesto. He was inaugurated as governor on January 14, 1963. Two months earlier, the Kennedy Administration had been told the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa would be required to desegregate, and George Wallace decided he would take a stand there. He did at the entrance used by students to register. However, Robert Kennedy, Attorney General, had arranged to federalize the Alabama National Guard if Wallace showed any resistance. Wallace had not resisted except for a mild statement that he "would return to Montgomery to continue working for constitutional government -- black and white." However, his symbolic resistance made him a hero to the blue collar workers of Alabama, the Klansmen and other white supremacists. The next day, Byron de la Beckwith, a white fertilizer salesman from Mississippi shot and killed Medgar Evers, a black civil rights activist in Jackson, Mississippi. On September 15, 1963 a package of powerful explosives was placed next to the entrance of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. It exploded the next morning, a Sunday, while parishioners were attending services, killing four children. City officials lamented another public relations disaster, but not one of them expressed remorse for the four murdered victims. And in an absolute charade, Governor Wallace announced the arrest of the bombers. The local police knew the arrest would undermine the evidence so painstakingly gathered by the FBI, and it did. Chambliss, Cagle, and a third Klansman went on trial and were sentenced to six months for the misdemeanor of transporting dynamite without a permit. The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics by Dan T. Carter has told this entire story in riveting detail.


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It is almost miraculous that Lyndon Johnson ever found the votes to pass any civil rights legislation in the 1960s, but the naked violence of Wallace's Alabama and the brutalities to which civil rights activists were subjected during these years certainly helped. Mickey Schwermer, Andrew Goodman, and James Cheney, three northern activists arrived in Meridian, Alabama on June 21, 1964. On the next day, all three were arrested on a trumped up speeding charge. Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price said he released them after getting a $20 fine. They were never seen again, until their bodies were unearthed near a dam on August 4, 1964. The Department of Justice convened a federal grand jury that indicted Price and others for conspiring to violate the civil rights of Goodman, Schwermer, and Chaney. Judge William Harold Cox, a judge of the United States District Court and a white supremacist, reduced the charge to a misdemeanor, which the Supreme Court reversed. United States v. Price, 383 U. S. 787 (1966). At the trial, Price and seven others were convicted, the first time an all-white jury convicted white defendants in a civil rights case. Finally, the accumulated white-initiated violence against black Americans in the South compelled Congress to act. It enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and later, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It became clear, too, that Southern law and order was selective. It acquitted a white racist with a history of violence and jailed black demonstrators for civil rights. When one Northern woman, Viola Liuzzo, was run down , shot and killed by four Klansmen, the four were acquitted even after one of the four, an FBI informer, testified at the trial. White juries did nothing to promote justice for black Americans. Every culture seems to need an enemy, and the Southern culture had plenty of enemies. However, too many Southerners tried shifting the blame for cruelty against blacks to the Supreme Court and "outside agitators" from the North who demonstrated out of the moral conviction they were right. With the South, it was "blame the victim" for the wrongs suffered by black Americans. Even though George Wallace presided over a corrupt system and exploited white racism perhaps better than any other American politician, he was a hero to the states of the Old Confederacy. In 1964, Wallace established organizations in Wisconsin and Indiana, his first political moves outside the solid South. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson wanted to postpone any serious decisions about Vietnam until after the election in which ultra-conservative Barry Goldwater was the Republican nominee. Television ads and his militant conservatism at the Republican Convention ruined Goldwater -"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," he said in accepting the nomination. One television ad asked the rhetorical question "Do you want this man with his finger on the [nuclear] button?" Goldwater projected a


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bellicose image, and this ad exploited the public perception of belligerence. The election was a landslide. Lyndon Johnson got 61.1 percent of the popular vote and 486 electoral votes, while Goldwater got 38.5 percent of the popular vote and only 52 electoral votes. After the 1964 election, Johnson moved ever deeper into the Vietnam quagmire, and an outraged public threatened to oust Johnson from the White House. He announced his withdrawal from the campaign in early 1968. Lyndon Johnson announced a War Against Poverty modelled on principles worked out during the Kennedy Administration. In 1965, Johnson signed the bill he had proposed establishing Medicare. The amounts spent to support this program which covered medical aid to persons over 65 began modestly enough -- $7.6 billion in 1970 -- but expanded rapidly to $268 billion in 1990 according to the Statistical Abstract of the United States for 1992. Johnson's War Against Poverty included a Community Action Plan (CAP) that allowed local citizens to organize using some federal funds appropriated for the Office of Economic Opportunity. A fair amount of OEO funds went into teaching the poor how to take action against slumlords and ineffective city bureaucrats, which resulted in alienating the mayors of cities like Los Angeles and Chicago. Then Senator Patrick Moynihan, in 1965 an Assistant Secretary of Labor in the Johnson Administration, wrote a report entitled "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action." Unfortunately, it was perceived as a "blame the victim" approach. Black Americans were irritated by this report and saw spending money on the Vietnam War as diverting funds away from advancing their their agenda on programs like Head Start and the Job Corps. For Johnson, advancing the interests of the poor and black became a choice of guns or butter, and Congress voted for guns and Vietnam. Going in to 1968, President Johnson had alienated or lost a major source of traditional support for the Democrats, black Americans who thought the United States should withdraw from a costly war in Asia. Whether George Wallace saw this dilemna in the offing is questionable, but the urban riots of summer, 1968 helped Wallace significantly. George Wallace qualified his American Independence Party in enough states to represent a threat in the presidential election of 1968. Richard Nixon was the Republican nominee and ran against Hubert Humphrey. Nixon got 43.4 percent of the popular vote and 301 electoral votes to Humphrey's 191. The rest went to George Wallace who got 9.9 million votes, but only 46 electoral votes. Wallace votes came from blue collar workers in many states; his campaign rhetoric captured the rage of white workers at even the thought of equality with black Americans. In the South, Wallace featured speeches condeming the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The "pointy-headed liberals" who


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insisted on desegregating the public schools.were his favorite targets. Demonstrators for civil rights were all described as Communist "outside agitators." And on May 27, 1968 the Supreme Court added fuel to the Wallace fire. Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, Virginia. 391 U.S. 430 (1968). A unanimous court held that Virginia's "freedom of choice" operated to perpetuate the racially dual school system mandated by state law. And as white flight accelerated, only busing could achieve the objectives set forth in Green. "Busing," Wallace said, "is the most asinine cruel thing I've ever heard of." Between 1964, when Barry Goldwater was the Republican nominee for president and 1968, Richard Nixon developed his Southern Strategy. Republicans, Nixon argued, should reach out to the South's emerging middle-class suburban constituency without using Goldwater's hard-line segregation identification. This played well in the South but alienated moderate Republicans in vote-heavy Northern states. Even though Goldwater lost in the proverbial landslide, some Republicans were elected to Congress from the South. Nixon had a few chips to cash in after the 1964 election. He had campaigned loyally for Goldwater and badly wanted the presidency in 1968. His key to the Southern Republicans was Strom Thurmond. Nixon convinced Thurmond that angry whites, if given a choice between any conceivable national Democrat and Nixon would reluctantly vote Republican, thus freeing him to appeal to moderates in the rest of the country. Thurmond was a racist hounded by his past; a civil rights rejectionist par excellence. Nixon told delegates from the South that he would have to defer to mandates from the Supreme Court and Congress, but he said he would do as little about either as circumstances required. And the delegates were pleased with the nomination of Spiro Agnew as the candidate for vice president. Agnew was a modest man, but "...as one observer noted, "he had a lot to be modest about." His ethical lapses later led to his resignation before being convicted of kickbacks in Maryland. The Democratic nominee for president was Hubert Humphrey who had to campaign on Lyndon Johnson's record. While campaigning in the California primary of 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in a Los Angeles hotel. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was also assassinated in April, 1968 while standing on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. The rioting in American cities spilled over into Chicago, the venue of the Democratic Convention. Anti-Vietnam demonstrators were very much in evidence, and televised rioting did not help the Democrats or advance the cause of civil rights. George Wallace initially ran an unorganized campaign with money rolling in, most of it from individuals who gave less than $20 each. It was a genuine grass roots campaign and it almost did what Wallace planned, to have the House name the president, because no candidate had the constitutional majority


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of electoral votes. Had there been a slight shift of the popular vote in certain states, the House of Representatives would decide who was to be president, with each state having one vote. In 1968, George Wallace pioneered in what today we would consider to be the major social issues. Crime was one of them, and here's what he said more than once: And so, my friends, today law and order is an issue. And, as I used to say, if someone knocks you in the head when you walk out of this building tonight, the person who knocks you in the head is out of jail before you bget to the hospital, and on Monday, they'll try a policeman about the matter, They'll line up trying a policeman about it.

Dan Carter, author of The Politics of Rage, was interviewed on National Public Radio on November 1, 1995. He elaborated on this archival tape: "Well, he was saying this even earlier. Obviously, there were other candidates who talked about the crime issue, but withWallace, again, it has to do with his effectivenes as an orator. What he does is to take the crime issue and personalize it. It's not some vague abstract issue. It's what's going to happen to you -- you're going to be hit over the head, you're going to end up in the hospital. And then he loads on to that this anger and rage over what is seen as the way in which the criminal is not sufficiently punished. And when he puts this together, it becomes one of the greatest crowd pleasers, really, beginning as early as 1968." In response to an introductory question from the interviewer, Carter responded: "He [Wallace] understood that there were millions of Americans who felt in some way or another betrayed, betrayed by what they saw as the decline in American culture, in values, moral values, and frightened. The war in Vietnam, the riots, the rise in crime, and all these things we now associate with the 1960s, but Wallace saw them coming in every case." Everywhere in the country in the years following the Supreme Court rulings on desegregation saw Wallace as the man who stood in the schoolhouse door blocking desegregation of Alabama's schools. Here's what Wallace said in an archival tape: I stand here today as governor of this sovereign state and refuse to willingly submit to the illegal usurpation of power to the central government. I claim today for all the people of the state of Alabama those rights reserved to them under the Constitution of the United States, among those powers so reserved and claimed is a right of state authority in the operation of the public schools, colleges, and universities. My action does not constitute disobedience to legislative and constitutional provisions. It is not defiance for defiance sake, but for the purpose of raising basic and fundamental constitutional questions. My action is a call for strict adherence to the Constitution of the United States as it was


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written for a cessation of usurpation and abuses. My action seeks to avoid having state sovereignty sacrificed on the altar of political expediency.

This tirade, similar to the argument raised by John Calhoun in 1830 leading to nullification of federal laws by the states, resonated throughout the country. According to Dan Carter, there are echoes of George Wallace in the politics of 1995, the Contract with America, Rush Limbaugh, and the assault from the right. The Republicans had more than ever committed the party to pursue conservatism mixed in with the patriotic theme of antiCommunism in Vietnam. Richard Nixon had not forgotten the shock of the Tet offensive in January, 1968. Vietcong guerillas actually occupied some of the American Embassy grounds in Saigon. The President's National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders reported that the nation was "moving toward two societies, one black and one white -- separate and unequal." And the riots that followed King's assassination were on such a massive scale throughout the country that they generated a white backlash. President Johnson had left Richard Nixon an opportunity to use the Vietnam War differently, but he failed in the War against Poverty. However, events outside the United States in 1967 once again involved America in the affairs of Israel. After the 1956 war when Israel, Great Britain, and France withdrew from the Suez Canal area, the United Nations authorized a UN peacekeeping mission in the Sinai. In conjunction with Syria, Egypt decided on war again to push Israel into the sea. Jordan's King Hussein joined this coalition. Egypt's Nasser first told the UN to withdraw its peacekeeping troops from the Sinai, troops massed on both the Jordanian borders, and it was clear to Israel's leaders that an Arab-Israeli war was about to occur again. Furthermore, Egyptian forces initiated a naval blockade preventing Israel-bound vessels from entering the Gulf of Aqaba to deliver their cargo to an Israeli port. A blockade like this was an act of war within the framework of international law. So on June 6, 1967 Israeli Air Force jets hit Egyptian aircraft on the ground, destroying all or most of them in this preremptive strike. All this led to a land war in which Egyptian troops were displaced from the Gaza Strip. Jordanian troops were driven out of the West Bank and back to Jordan which had unlawfully occupied the West Bank, having annexed it in 1950. Often noted as the Six Day War, the future of the West Bank may be determined by a resolution of the UN Securitry Council. On November 23, 1967 the Security Council adopted its Resolution 242. Its paragraph (i) contained the critical language. The Charter requires "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent [1967] conflict" (Emphasis added). In fact, Israel did withdraw from the Sinai in conformity with the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1979. Since then, Israel has signed and ratified a peace treaty between it and Jordan. There is nothing


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in that treaty requiring Israel to withdraw from the West Bank, even though Jordan occupied this area between 1949 and 1977. Israel has not signed a peace treaty with Syria. And there is nothing in either the UN Charter or customary international law which leads one to suppose that military occupation, pending a peace treaty, is illegal. The Golan Heights are properly administered by Israel. Unsurprisingly, there is another dimension to the Arab-Israeli conflict. In 1988, Israel undertook to deport two Palestinians convicted of crimes of violence within Israel. Deportation was argued before the Supreme Court of Israel sitting as the High Court of Justice. All nine justices upheld the deportation order. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, the opinion read, had never been incorporated into the internal law of Israel by legislative act of the Knesset. The process of incorporation is analogous to the constitutional requirement that a treaty of the United States must be ratified by the Senate, two-thirds concurring. This process if followed by an Act of Congress which incorporates the treaty itself into the internal law of this country is sufficient. Missouri v. Holland, 252 U.S. 416 (1920). In 1995 and 1996, the United States supported the peace process initiated in 1994 by agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. However, as the first stages were implemented it became clear that Hamas and Hezbollah, both terrorist groups, would oppose the peace process. In April, 1996 Israel hit back at rocket attacks on its border with Lebanon by air attacks on what was said to be Hezbollah offices. Syria is the only real beneficiary of this low level war. It can support terrorist groups without being attacked itself. Syria's President Hafez al-Assad demands that the Golan Heights be returned to Syria without conditions, and Israel's Prime Minister Shimon Peres had scheduled a referendum for June, 1996 on the entire peace process. By reacting in self-defense, Peres hopes to position himself and his Labor coalition as the peacemakers. On May 29, 1996 Israel held an election under a new law that allowed voters to cast separate ballots for prime minister and members of the Knesset. Benjamin Netanyahu, a member of the Likud, was expected to win in a very close election with Labor's Shimon Peres, the Prime Minister who had been negotiating with Yasser Arafat. Peres was defeated,the only election issue was Israel's security during a peace process that contemplated the surrender of some West Bank land in exchange for peace with Palestinians. A Palestinian claim to this land is tenuous at best. What is now Lebanon, Syria, and Israel was ruled for some three hundred years by the Ottomans. The Ottoman Empire was on the losing side during World War I, and the League of Nations conveyed all of Palestine, i.e., Israel, to Great Britain as a mandate in 1923. During the existence of the Mandate for Palestine, the British favored the Arabs, but Jews rallied support for their


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cause in London. In 1917, Prime Minister David Balfour announced the Balfour Declaration which favored Palestine as a "homeland for the Jews." This declaration had no legal effect at all. However, it buttressed a Jewish claim to a part of the West Bank when Great Britain terminated its mandate in 1947. In a cynical move, Great Britain colluded with Jordan which annexed all of the West Bank in 1950, having acquired it by violation of the United Nations Charter. Great Britain and Pakistan were the only nations recognizing this illegal act which occurred as the result of a cynical policy in London to avoid implementing the Balfour Declaration and appeasing the Arab world. In 1967, Arab powers -- Egypt, Jordan, and Syria -- massed troops on the border of Israel. Egypt had not only demanded the UN peacekeeping force leave the Sinai area, but Gamal Nasser had authorized an Egtptian naval blockade which prevented commercial vessels from docking at Aqaba, an act of war. Israel launched a preemptive strike against Egypt, destroying all its aircraft on the ground. The Israeli Defense Forces, acting under Article 51 of the UN Charter -- its right of self defense against an armed attack by Jordan and Syria -- drove Jordanian troops out of the West Bank and Egyptian troops out of the Gaza District and back across the Sinai to the Suez Canal. During the period between 1949 and 1967, Jordan occupied the entire West Bank. Jordanian armed forces and Muslim civilians razed Jewish synagogues and vandalized Jewish burial grounds. Jordan even announced its annexation of the West Bank as an extension of the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan and did so with the connivance fo Great Britain. See Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine by Avi Schlaim. It was published in 1988 by the Columbia University Press. In September, 1996 Israelis and Palestinians were once again shooting each other over an event that seemed minor at the time. An archaeological tunnel used primarily by tourists was opened at one end by the new Likud coalition government. The tunnel itself has been around for at least eighteen years. In January, 1996 Yasser Arafat and the then Labor Government of Shimon Peres agreed to the new opening in the tunnel. However now that the peace process is being negotiated by Netanyahu, the new Prime Minister with a Likud coalition has taken a hardline with negotiations. The PLO agreement with the previous Labor government was signed in 1993. Amongst other matters, the parties agreed that a "five-year transitional period will begin upon the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and Jericho." Israel withdrew from both in 1995. The permanent status negotiations, including the legal status of Jerusalem, were to occur no later than 1998. Arafat and all Palestinian see Jerusalem as the capital of an independent Palestinian state. Prime Minister Netanyahu has said that would not be a


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negotiable matter, Even his predecessor, Shimon Peres never publicly committed Israel to agree with this Palestinian position. The 1993 declaration of principles also called for or an election leading to the establishment of a Palestinian Council. The election occurred, and Yasser Arafat became its president. It also provided for a Palestinian police force "in order to guarantee public order and internal security for the Palestinians of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip." Violence erupted in late September, 1996. Palestinian television showed the opening of a tunnel near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The tunnel runs some 500 yards through history. It follows the giant retaining stones of the Temple Mount, which itself was the site of the First and Second Temples of the Jewish faith. The tunnel passes through layers of Jerusalem's history. from Arab structures back through Crusader foundations of the 13th. Century, a Byzantine pool, a Roman street and an aqueduct built by the Maccabeans in the year 2 BC. The only remnant of the structures of the Temple Mount left after 2000 years was the Western or Wailing Wall, a holy site of the Jews. In place of the temples which were destroyed, the Dome of the Rock, Islam's third holiest site and the Al Aqsa Mosque were built by the Arabs, probably in the 8th century AD. In April of last year, the Labor government of Yitzshack Rabin made a deal with the Muslim authorities. Israel would allow Muslims to Worship in another underground complex -- Solomon's Stables -- under the Temple Mount, to be controlled by the Palestinians. The Muslims then would not oppose a new entrance to the tunnel at the North end. Visitors to the tunnel exit at that point instead of retracing their steps 500 yards to the South. Muslim authorities had long known of the tunnel, had visited it and were aware that it was far from any mosque. However, the tunnel opening in late September, 1996 took place against a background of negotiations during the peace process that began in Madrid, Spain in 1992. Then, the Oslo Agreement led to the IsraeliPalestinian Liberation Organization Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government which was signed by Yitzshack Rabin and Yasser Arafat in 1993 in Washington D.C. Article VIII of the Declaration of Principles provided for a Palestinian police force "[to] guarantee public order and internal security for the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza..." By 1996, this Police force had some 40,000 members. The Israeli authorities allowed these police to carry arms, quite a concession from rabin's Labor government given the violent opposition of Hamas to any peace process and the terrorism of Hezbollah financed by Iran and initiated with training in Syrian-controlled Lebanon. It doesn't take a genius to conclude that the 40,000-member Palestinian police force could easily be supplied with weapons more lethal than rapid-firing rifles.


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During the violence that followed the opening of the North exit by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Palestinian police used their weapons against Israelis, instead of keeping "public order". Most objective observers of the violence agreed that Palestinian fury was not motivated by religion at all; it was political. Palestinians were frustrated by Netanyahu's hard-line attitude; they had raised expectations from their discussions with Shimon Peres who succeeded Rabin as Prime Minister of Israel, after the 1995 assassination by a deranged Jew. An election took place in June, 1996 and Netanyahu defeated Peres by a narrow margin. During the violence. members of the United Nations were reported to be lining up for their ritual condemnation of Israel. It seems clear that Arafat has been unable to restrain excesses of the Palestinians and the escalation of violence in late September was no exception. This has been a rite that has been almost continuous since 1967 when Israeli Defense Forces expelled Jordanian armed forces from the West Bank and Egypt from the Gaza Strip. Both of them had occupied these territories unlawfully by war in 1948-49. From 1949 to 1967, Jordan occupied the West Bank. During the occupation Palestinians vandalized Jewish synagogues and burial grounds. In 1973, Israel was once again attacked by Syria and Egypt. After the defeat of these invaders, President Carter managed to bring Israel and Egypt together at Camp David in 1978. This meeting finally brought peace between Israel and Egypt. As of 1996. Israel had signed peace treaties with both Jordan and Egypt. The Palestinians however seems to want an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. Netanyahu's Likud coalition opposes this as a real threat to Israel's security, and Syria, as of the end of 1996 had not yet indicated any willingness to join the peace process.

Richard Nixon was sworn in at noon on January 20, 1969. Between that date and American withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975, President Nixon carried on this war as though he expected to "win" it, at least until his resignation on August 9, 1974. During this period, Nixon pursued three major policy initiatives, ending the Vietnam War, deploying anti-ballistic missiles defenses, and retreating from the positions established by the Supreme Court in desegregating the nation's public schools. Dr. Henry Kissinger was the president's National Security Adviser and laid the foundation for Nixon's trip to China in 1972. As a result of this trip, the Peoples' Republic of China (PRC), Nixon laid the foundation for the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and the Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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People's Republic of China. The PRC also succeeded to Taiwan's seat at the United Nations. In exchange for this concession, the United States should have, but did not demand, that the PRC withdraw its troops from Tibet. It had occupied this Buddhist country in 1950 in violation of Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter. Since 1950, the PRC has systematically killed an estimated 800,000 Tibetens, and in 1995 appointed its own Panchen Lama, an eight-year old child, to be the successor to the Dalai Lama, the religious leader of the Buddhists. The legitimate Dalai Lama is now a refugee. Domestically, however, Vietnam occupied center stage from January 20, 1969 to August 9, 1974. Richard Nixon also engaged in the secret bombing of Cambodia. According to Tom Wicker, "The president ordered and Kissinger arranged a sustained bombing campaign, kept secret from the American public and requiring doctored Air Force records to remove all traces of the bombing from the history of the war." Notwithstanding, the New York Times ran a story about this illegal bombing of a friendly neutral on May 8, 1969. About a year later, Nixon announced a joint American-South Vietnamese operation into Cambodia, noting at the same time that "for five years, neither the U.S. nor South Vietnam moved against those sanctuaries [in Cambodia]. " This statement was false on its face; Nixon lied to the American public, describing his action as "winding the war down" when in fact he was expanding its reach to Cambodia. Antiwar protests mounted. Nixon could not have been unaware of antiwar protests as early as 1965, even though he was not occupying any elective office then. However, in 1964 an obscure organization called Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) publicly announced there would be a demonstration in Washington on April 17, 1965. The date was not chosen by accident. President Johnson was scheduled to and did deliver a speech at Johns Hopkins University on April 7. In his speech, Johnson announced he was then ready for "unconditional negotiations" -- but not with the National Liberation Front (NLF) and only to negotiate an "independent South Vietnam." If the speech had any effect, it probably increased the anger at Johnson's duplicity and galvanized more people into action. The SDS march in Washington brought out an estimated 25,000 demonstrators, at that time, the largest demonstration in the city's history. Demonstrations continued into the 1970s throughout the entire country. On November 15, 1969 a million people marched against the war, after a demonstration in New York in October of an estimated 400,000 people. About year to a year and a half later, the Supreme Court ruled in the socalled Pentagon Papers case. New York Times v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971). On June 13, 1971 the New York Times published the first installment of the Pentagon Papers, a classified, seven thousand page document commissioned by President Johnson's Secretary of Defense, Robert


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McNamara. These documents were leaked to the press by Daniel Ellsburg who was later indicted for his role in the case. Ironically, the case against Ellsburg was later dismissed for governmental misconduct. Initially, Nixon was not particularly upset with publication of the Pentagon Papers which were critical of American involvement in Vietnam. According to one of Nixon's biographers, Tom Wicker in his book, One of Us, Dr. Henry Kissinger "was beside himself with rage and fear....He figured frequently in the Pentagon Papers, for one thing, owing to his work as a consultant for the Johnson administration; and he did not wish to be connected with that earlier and none too admirable history....Daniel Ellsburg, in fact, had drafted -- at Kissinger's instigation - an important transition paper on Vietnam that had first guided Nixon's policy in Southeast Asia." Nixon now shared Kissinger's feelings up to a point. On June 15, 1971 the Nixon Administration secured an order from the District Court temporarily enjoining publication. Three days later, the judge of that court denied a permanent injunction, but a judge of the Court of Appeals blocked further publication pending an appeal by the United States. On June 25, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an expedited appeal by both the New York Times and the Washington Post. In the District Court for the District of Columbia, the judge rendered judgment from which the United States appealed and the Court of Appeals affirmed. During this process and in argument before the Supreme Court, the Pentagon Papers case became better known by far than any other case before the Supreme Court. Every newspaper in the country carried the story in banner headlines. Television and radio news carried almost hourly reports on the judicial process and what the Pentagon Papers -- entitled "History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on Viet Nam Policy -- " was all about. On June 30, 1971 the Supreme Court, by 6-3, held that the United States had not met the heavy burden of showing justification for the imposition of prior restraint on publication of the Pentagon Papers; it would have been in violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Chief Justice Warren Burger, appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon and was sworn in on June 23, 1969 dissented. "I suggest," he wrote, "that we are in this posture [of not knowing the facts] because these cases have been conducted in unseemly haste....Here, moreover, the frenetic haste is due in large part to the manner in which the Times proceeded from the date it got the purloined documents." Even so, Erwin N. Griswold, Solicitor General of the United States observed after the decision that "It turned out as it should."


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The aftermath of the Pentagon Papers case had implications for later actions of President Nixon. In July, 1971 Nixon authorized Egil Krogh to get information discrediting Ellsberg; he didn't trust either the CIA or the FBI. Krogh put together a secret unit later referred to as the "plumbers;" they had the duty of stopping informational leaks in the Nixon Administration. Two members of the plumbers unit proposed to and did break into the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding in Los Angeles. Fielding was Ellsberg's psychiatrist. As Tom Wicker wrote in One of Us, the Fielding break-in over the Labor Day weekend "produced nothing of use to the plumbers, much less to national security." Krogh agreed to the break-in because "he thought the doctor's files might show whether Ellsberg was acting under Soviet influence." In stead of reporting the plumbers to the police, as he probably should have, John Ehrlichman saw his job "as protecting the president, not exposing him," again according to Tom Wicker. Ehrlichman was one of two chief aides to President Nixon. The other was Robert Haldeman. On June 7, 1971 an article by Marine Corps veteran, Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr. appeared in the Armed Forces Journal. The article, entitled "The Collapse of the Armed Forces" in turn appeared in Vietnam and America: A Documented History, published by the Grove Press in 1995. The first two paragraphs of this long article suggest the dimensions of the military problem within the armed forces in Vietnam and Germany. The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States. By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in state bordering on collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near-mutinous. Elsewhere than Vietnam the situation is nearly as serious. Intolerably clobbered and buffeted from without and within by social turbulence, pandemic drug addiction, race war, sedition, civilian scapegoatise, draftee recalcitrance and malevolence, barracks theft and common crime, unsupported in their travail by the general government, in Congress, as well as the Executive branch, distrusted, disliked and often reviled by the general public, the uniformed services today are places of agony for the loyal, silent professionals who doggedly hang on and try to keep the ship afloat.

According to a note in the Introduction of this article, its editors state: " It was hard to dismiss the views of Colonel Heinl, a combat veteran with twenty-seven years' experience in the Marines....and author of five books...." Whether this article was ever read by or described to President Nixon is unknown. He continued with conduct calculated "to end the war with honor."


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The year 1971 was not all bad for President Nixon. On July 9 Henry Kissinger made a secret trip to Beijing to start the process of normalizing relations with the People's Republic of China. Nixon had complicated reasons for this step. Nixon saw a rapprochement with Beijing as influencing Moscow to help with a settlement of the war in Vietnam. When Nixon made his announcement about the deal in Beijing, Moscow reacted predictably with shock as did officials in Hanoi. They felt betrayed by the Chinese. Nixon also said he would travel to China in mid-1972. He travelled to Bejing in February, 1972 and had long discussions with Mao Tse-tung. Nixon's trip was a big domestic political plus, particularly since in October, 1971 he had announced a summit meeting for May, 1972 in Moscow. At this summit meeting, Brezhnev and Nixon would sign the ABM Treaty. Nixon was a success on the international scene, except for Vietnam. China, a nation of about one billion people was brought into the international community, and Nixon was continuing down the road to limitation of nuclear weapons. An agreement to end war was not signed until the Paris Peace Accords of January 29, 1973. Even after the agreement was signed, there was about two years of fighting still ahead. The war finally ended with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. Some 58,000 Americans died in this war that even Robert McNamara described as a "horrible mistake." Mr. McNamara was Secretaty of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

Escape from Vietnam An American official punches a man in the face during the evacuation of Nha Trang, dated April 1, 1975

Just before election day in November, 1972 Nixon had another problem. Russell Means and some native Americans from the American Indian Movement (AIM) moved into the Washington office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They had discussions in mind about all the treaties the United States had made with Indian nations and broken. The trip from Denver to Washington was called "The Trail of Broken Treaties." Means wrote a book about these and other wrongs, Where White Men Fear to Tread, published in 1995 by St. Martin's Press. AIM and Means took on the federal government during the 1970s, demonstrated at Mount Rushmore -- the Indian claim to title seems valid historically -- and for seventy-one days AIM withstood the attack of heavily armed federal agents at Wounded Knee. There, in 1860, American soldiers had killed Indian women and children, moving the Sioux out of land wanted by the United States. Endpapers of the book show maps of the Great Sioux


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Indian Reservation of 1890. However, according to Means, by then "the white man had already stolen the Black Hills [of the Dakotahs] and much of the land reserved by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868." That treaty "granted to the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe the unqualified right of 'absolute and undisturbed use and occupation' of their reservation lands." Justice Thomas had no trouble finding a way around this language. South Dakota v. Bourland, 113 S.Ct. 2309 (1993). "Congress," he wrote, "has the power to abrogate Indians' treaty rights." Justices Blackmun and Souter joined in an a strongly-worded dissent. In 1973, Means was charged with crimes arising out of Indian occupation of Wounded Knee, the site of the Sioux Massacre there in 1890. However, he was acquitted on some charges and the rest were dismissed because of governmental misconduct. At Wounded Knee, Nixon had a small shooting war on his hands, but he refused to negotiate as long as the Indians occupied their territory as described in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. While President Nixon was managing the Vietnam War, he was also looking at reelection in 1972. He had kept the promises made to his Southern supporters by nominating Warren Burger as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Burger took his oath of office on June 23, 1969. One early case was destined to reach the Supreme Court from Virginia, and Nixon may have known what outcome would be favorable from his point of view. Bradley v. School Board of Richmond, Virginia, 338 F. Supp. 67 (CD Va. 1972). There, the District Court made the only possible decision in ordering school districts in two adjoining counties consolidated with a third for the purpose of achieving racial balance. Busing was not involved. On appeal, the District Court judgment was reversed at a hearing en banc. Bradley v. School Board of Richmond, Virginia, 462 F.2nd 1058 (4th Cir. 1973). Judge Winter dissented, excoriating his judicial colleagues. The Supreme Court affirmed the Court of Appeals by a 4-4 vote in a per curiam order, Justice Powell not participating. See 412 U.S. 92. "The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided court." However, while this judicial travesty was being decided in Virginia, another case in Michigan was working its way through the federal court system and reached the Supreme Court. Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974). The Detroit school district, then the fifth largest in the country, covered 140 square miles; at the time of the litigation in 1970, its school population of almost 290,000, was 65 percent black and 35 percent white - a substantial recent growth due to white flight from Detroit to its suburbs. The District Court held that the Detroit School District had engaged in segregative practices. It concluded that the only way to achieve the racial balance mandated by Green v. New Kent County was to order busing that included some of the surrounding suburban school districts. The Court of Appeals affirmed, fearing that not to to do so would "nullify Brown v. Board of Education" and "restore the separate but equal


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doctrine" of Plessy v. Ferguson. In the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Burger wrote for the narrow 5-4 majority, with Justices Douglas, White, Marshall, and Brennan dissenting. In Milliken v. Bradley, parents and others brought an action in the District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. The action sought relief from illegal segregation in the Detroit school system. After a trial, the court found the system was illegally segregated, 338 F. Supp. 582. In its opinion, the court found that: "Governmental actions and inaction at all levels federal, state and local, have combined with those of private organizations, such as lending institutions and real estate associations and brokerage firms, to establish and maintain the pattern of residential segregation throughout the Detroit metropolitan area." After an appeal, the Court remanded the case to the trial court, directing it to prepare a metropolitan desegregation plan. By this, the Court of Appeals meant not only Detroit in Wayne County, but also the 85 school systems in adjoining Macomb and Oakland Counties. 468 F.2d 902. The District Court acted by preparing a multidistrict desegregation plan. 345 F. Supp. 914. The state agencies appealed, and the Court of Appeals affirmed. In other words, a constitutionally adequate system of desegregated schools could not be established within Wayne County alone and that a metropolitan multidistrict was essential, 484 F.2d 215 (CA6). In part, the court held that "any less comprehenve a solution than a metropolitan area plan would result in an all black school system [in Wayne County where Detroit is situated] immediately surrounded by practically all white suburban school systems, with an overwhelmingly white majority population in the total metropolitan area." Writing for a bitterly divided court, Chief Justice Burger had difficulty getting around this record, but he found a way. He simply wrote: "With no showing of significant violation by the 53 [suburban] outlying school districts and no evidence of any interdistrict violation or effect, the [District and Court of Appeals] court went beyond the original theory of the case as framed by the pleadings and mandated a metropolitan area remedy," This said the Chief Justice "was wholly impermissible." In a dissent written by Justice White with whom Justices Douglas, Brennan, and Marshall join, Justice White wrote: "Regretfully, and for several reasons, I can join neither the Court's judgment nor its opinion. The core of my disagreement is that deliberate acts of segregation and their consequences will go unremedied, not because a remedy would be infeasible or unreasonable in terms of the usual criteria governing school desegregation cases, but because an effective remedy would cause what the Court considers to be an undue administrative inconvenience to the State. The result is that the State of Michigan, the entity at which the the


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Fourteenth Amendment is directed, has successfully insulated itself from its duty to provide effective desegregation remedies by vesting sufficient power over its public schools in its local school districts. If this is the case in Michigan, it will be the case in most States....I am even more mystified as to how the Court can ignore the legal reality that the constitutional violations, even if occurring locally, were committed by governmental entities for which the State is responsible..." Justice Marshall, joined by Justices Douglas, Brennan, and White, wrote a separate dissenting opinion. Marshall wrote: "In Brown v Board of Education, this court held that segregation of children in public schools on the basis of race deprives minority group children of equal educational opprotunities....After 20 years of small, often difficult steps, the Court today takes a giant step backward." In 1972, the Supreme Court considered the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972). It held that this penalty was a violation of the Eighth Amendment which stated that "cruel and unusual punishment [shall not be] inflicted." Justice Stewart wrote for the court, noting that the Eighth Amendment incorporated a "basic concept of human dignity." He found that the death penalty was not cruel and unusual per se. However, only four years later the Supreme Court reinstated this penalty in Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153 (1976). This decision has been criticized by legal scholars. If, in other words, human dignity stands as an independent moral criterion for deciding when a punishment is cruel and unusual, then the plurality should have read into the amendment the specific moral and factual conditions that aggravate and mitigate the case for capital punishment. In Furman, Justice Stewart also emphasized that constitutional acknowledgement and public acceptance of the death penalty strengthens its presumptive validity and that retribution is a valid legislative consideration.


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© 1996 Danziger Used with permission of The Christian Science Monitor and The Los Angeles Times Syndicate

Nixon was as eager to pack the Supreme Court in 1970 as Roosevelt was in 1937. As part of his Faustian bargain with the Southern Devil, he nominated Clement F. Haynesworth, Jr. to the Supreme Court. J Edgar Hoover's FBI, when conducting the background check, overlooked Haynesworth's segregationist baggage and instead sent a glowing report. He had consistently voted against civil rights in opinions he wrote as a judge of the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. The Senate declined to confirm the nomination. Never one to give up, Nixon instructed Harry Dent, an aide, to find a judge even more conservative than Haynesworth. Nixon's search team came up with Florida's Harold Carswell. According to Kenneth O'Reilly's book, Nixon's Piano, Carswell was considered "a boob, a dummy" by Senator Birch Bayh. Another Nixon aide, Bruce Harlow agreed with Bayh's description. But the FBI was ecstatic, having completely missed Carswell's segregationist background and his attitude of white supremecy. So, Carswell was rejected by the Senate, too. Desperate, Nixon finally nominated Justice Blackmun, a moderate, and an exhausted Senate confirmed the nomination. Milliken v. Bradley was decided in 1974. Richard Nixon had been overwhelmingly reelected in 1972 running against George McGovern. Ironically, his popular vote -- 60.7 and all but 18 electoral votes -- Nixon probably got less than an impressive share of the black vote in 1972. They wanted the United States to withdraw from Vietnam, since the war required so much federal funding, the needs of black Americans were being ignored. Among other things, black Americans found it very difficult to move to the suburbs and better schools for their children.


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Another Nixon Supreme Court, Justice Lewis Powell, wrote for the majority in Village of Arlington Heights, Illinois v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corporation, 429 U.S. 252 (1977). Metropolitan Housing was a non-profit real estate developer which had contracted to purchase a tract of land in suburban Arlington Heights about fifteen miles from Chicago. Some 190 units of racially integrated residential units for low and moderate income groups were planned. The local plannning authorities refused to change the zoning from single family to multi-family classification. The area involved was owned by a religious order, and the contract was subject to cancellation unless the zoning change was approved. It was not approved after hearings before the local Planning Commission, and three black Americans filed suit alleging racial discrimination. With three dissents, the Supreme Court rejected the claim of racial discrimination violative of the Fourteenth Amendment. Citing an earlier case, Justice Powell wrote that "official action will not be held unconstitutional solely because it results in racially disproportionate impact." The quoted language is little better than an empty formalism designed to skirt equal protection with the added feature of denying black Americans a right to move to all-white suburban areas created by white flight from inner cities. Despite his Faustian bargain with the representatives of the white South, Nixon's undoing began in Washington on the night of June 17, 1972. The Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex there were broken into and burgled. The Washington Post led the press in getting the ensuing story and wrote a bestselling book, All the President's Men. Later, it was a film produced with some, but not all of the story behind the story. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward kept the story alive with their news in the Washington Post, and the rest of the press had to take some of what they got about Watergate from Bernstein and Woodward. These two reporters had a secret source named Deep Throat whose identity remained a secret. Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies is an anthology discussing quite a few films, one of which was All the President's Men. William E. Leuchtenburg offers some comments on that film. "[It] succeeds brilliantly in providing the public policy context of Watergate. Its use of television footage also gives the film a cinema verité quality. Yet despite its virtuosity, All the President's Men still conveys a highly misleading impression of how Nixon and his cronies met their fate. The film draws to a close in 1973 with the completion of the Post's Watergate investigation -- but, curiously, with Nixon, reelected to a second term, triumphant....It leaves out almost all of the history of the Watergate affair. Sen. Sam Ervin, whose select committee held the first Congressional Watergate hearings and discovers the existence of the White House tapes, never makes an appearance. Nor does Congressman Peter Rodino, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee that approved three articles of impeachment against Nixon;"


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Linda Wertheimer is editor of a book entitled Listening to America: Twenty-Five Years in the Life of a Nation as Heard on National Public Radio. She did a good job of filling in most of the gaps in All the President's Men. The dimensions of the Watergate scandal are breathtaking. An Attorney General of the United States was convicted of obstructing justice. John Mitchell controlled a secret fund of about $500,000 for use against the Democrats and those on the president's Enemies List, for forging letters and leaking false news items to the press. Maurice Stans and John Mitchell were charged with taking $250,000 from Robert Vesco, now a fugitive living in Cuba, in exchange for deleting information about to be used by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Some material had disappeared from FBI files. This material rested on illegal wiretaps ordered by Henry Kissinger, and it turned up in John Ehrlichman's office. He and Haldeman were both convicted in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. In Listening to America, there is an account of Congressman Emanuel Cellar's interview on National Public Radio on May 16, 1973. In part, he said: I wonder how many of our citizens were as frightened as I was by the ways of the Watergate revelations. But for the courage of a federal judge and the persistence of some of the press, a sickening perversion of our whole political process would have become a standard of political behaviour.

On June 26, 1973 John Dean III, Counsel to the President, testified before Senate Watergate Committee. He accused Nixon of participating directly in the cover-up of the Watergate burglary. Dean read a 245-page statement to members of the committee that was televised nationally on all three networks. Josh Darsa covered the hearings for National Public Radio (NPR). In part, Darsa said: Darsa: If it wasn't vivid before, today's session of the Watergate hearings conclusively illustrated the one fact in this investigation upon which hinges the future course of this committee, this administration, and history. The fact is that John Dean at this moment is alone in presenting what he says he believes is the truth in the Watergate affair. If John Dean can be corroborated by other figures involved in Watergate, if his testimony before this committee can be cemented, if what he is saying is the truth, then the ramifications are enormous. Here's Senator Talmadge of Georgia: Talmadge: Mr. Dean, your charges are very grave. What makes you think your credibility is greater than the president's? Dean: I've told the truth as I've seen it. Darsa: Senator Montoya, reflecting on the president's April 17 statement of this year saying, "I condemn any attempts to cover up in this case, no matter who is involved. Montoya: Was the president telling the truth when he made that


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statement? Dean: No, sir. By that time he knew the full implications of the case. Haldeman and Ehrlichman were still on the staff. There was considerable pressure that they remain.

On July 16, 1973 Alexander Butterfield, Deputy White House Chief of Staff almost casually disclosed that Nixon secretly recorded conversations held in the Oval Office of the White House. President Nixon remained in office for about one year after this disclosure. Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace, pleading guilty to tax evasion, not paying taxes on bribes paid to him while he was Governor of Maryland. Nixon named Congressman Gerald Ford to replace Agnew as vice-president. Elliott Richardson who had become Attorney General of the United States after Mitchell's resignation, was fired by Nixon on November 20, 1973. Nixon had ordered Richardson to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox who had announced he would probably subpoena the White House tapes. Richardson refused to fire Cox, and resigned. Instead, Leon Jaworski was named Special Prosecutor, and Robert Bork, Solicitor General of the United States fired Cox. The House decided to hold hearings for the purpose of presenting a bill of impeachment agaimst Nixon. If adopted by the full House, the Senate would conduct the trial with the Chief Justice presiding. Had the process gone that far, one has to wonder if Burger would have recused himself as an appointee of Nixon. Burger, however, did write for a unanimous court in Nixon, President of the United States v. United States, 418 U. S. 683 (1974). In this case, Leon Jaworski, Special Prosecutor, filed a third party subpoena for the production of certain tapes held by the president. President Nixon, claiming executive privilege, resisted compliance. The Supreme Court held on July 24, 1974 that Nixon had to produce the tapes. Nixon sought to claim virtually unlimited privilege as executive by arguing that the judiciary was without jurisdiction to review a presidential assertion of executive privilege. See Nixon v. Sirica, 487 F.2d 700 (DC Cir. 1973). Justice Rehnquist, named to the court by Richard Nixon in November, 1971 took no part in the consideration or decisions of these cases. President Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974 very soon after the Supreme Court affirmed the order to produce the tapes. In an accompanying statement, he admitted the tapes subpoened contained statements "at variance with certain of my previous statements." A month after Nixon's resignation and departure from Washington, President Ford unconditionally pardoned Nixon for any crimes he may have committed while in office. Ford was nominated by the Republicans at their convention in 1976. He ran unsuccessfully against Democrat Jimmy Carter, formerly Governor of Georgia and a graduate of the Navy college in Annapolis, Maryland. Carter got 50.1 percent of the popular vote and 297 electoral votes. Ford


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got 48 percent of the popular vote and 240 electoral votes. Jimmy Carter contributed more to his country after he had served one full term. He may be remembered as the president at the time Iranians occupied the American Embassy in Teheran and didn't leave until Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. He was also president during the second oil shock sending prices skyrocketing -- the first oil shock was in 1974. However, high interest rates and the hostage situation were probably the most important factors in Carter's defeat. During its thirteen-year journey through the federal courts, President Carter did involve himself in a bitter dispute involving religious fundamentalism in the South, one that echoed the racism of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983). In their book, Storming the Gates: Protest Politics and the Republican Revival, Dan Baltz and Ronald Brownstein touch on this case. As the Supreme Court noted, "Bob Jones University is not affiliated with any religious denomination, but is dedicated to the teaching and propagation of its fundamentalist Christian religious beliefs." Until 1970, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) granted tax exempt status to private schools without regard to their racial admissions policies. That policy changed in January, 1970 after the decision in Green v. Kennedy, 309 F. Supp. 1127 appeal dismissed Cannon v. Green, 398 U.S. 956 (1970). That case prohibited the IRS from according tax exempt status to private schools in Mississippi that discriminated as to admissions on the basis of race. In 1971, Bob Jones University in South Carolina instituted an action seeking to enjoin the IRS from revoking its tax exempt status. The Supreme Court held that the University could not request injunctive relief before it paid a tax on income. It finally paid $21 and sued to recover it. The trial court held that revocation of the university's tax exempt status exceeded the delegated powers of the IRS and violated the university's rights under the Religion Clause of the First Amendment. 468 F. Supp. 890 (SC Dist. 1978). After the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed the lower court in 1980, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. Goldsboro Christian Schools, Inc. v. United States was consolidated with Bob Jones University for purposes of argument. In November, 1981 Representative Trent Lott (R. Miss.) moved the court for permission to file an amicus uriae (friend of the court) brief in both cases. His motion was granted at 454 U.S. 1121. As of 1995, Lott was a United States Senator from Missisasippi. In his brief, Lott argued that his Mississippi constituents were engaged in enterprises that would be threatened by the loss of tax exempt status for Goldsboro Christian Schools. It seemed clear he was referring to contributions made as to which his constituents in Mississippi claimed a deduction on their tax returns for contributions made to religious institutions in North and South Carolina, both of which were segregated. These constituents were in effect


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subsidizing segregation the court found inconsistent with the national interest. See also Green v. Connally, 330 F.Supp. 1150 (DC 1970), summarily affirmed Coit v Green, 404 U.S. 997 (1971). This was a case in which the IRS was sued by parents of black public school children to enjoin the IRS from according tax exempt status to private schools in Mississippi that discriminated against blacks. The IRS said it was without authority to deny the exemption, but did so in 1970 reacting to an injunction issued in Green v. Kennedy. Finally, the Supreme Court affirmed the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit that denied tax exempt status to segregated Christian schools in the South. Their teaching of religious fundamentalism did not bring them within the Free Exercise of Religion Clause of the First Amendment. Justice Rehnquist dissented. So, until 1983, contributors to these universities were subsidizing the political missionaries of the fundamentalist religious right. In 1980, Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan who promptly abandoned efforts to deny tax exempt status to Bob Jones University. The Supreme Court was forced to exercise its power to appoint counsel. It appointed William Coleman, Jr. who successfully argued the position abandoned by Reagan.

The 1980s began with nothing unremarkable. The voters, lulled by Reagan's soothing non sequiter, "There you go again, Jimmy," as Carter made a campaign point, elected a movie actor as President of the United States. Ronald Reagan got 50.7 percent of the popular vote but 489 electoral votes to 49 for the incumbent Jimmy Carter. He got 41.0 percent of the popular vote. To the dismay of the far right of the Republican Party, George Bush was nominated as Reagan's vice-presidential running mate. In the primaries leading up to the party convention, Bush described Reagan as preaching "voodoo economics," sometimes known as supply side economics. When Reagan took office on January 20, 1981 he promised to reverse the trend toward big government and to rejuvenate the economy by implementing this untested theory of supply side economics. By cutting taxes, Reagan claimed, the economy would stimulate so much growth that tax revenues would actually rise. In May, 1981, Congress approved legislation implementing this theory. Revenue did rise with normal Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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economic expansion, but Reagan went on a spending spree, particularly for national defense. According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States for 1996, the gross federal debt of the country for the fiscal year ending in October,1980 was $908,503,000,000 (billion). For the fiscal year ending in October, 1992 the gross federal debt was an estimated $4,002,136,000,000 (trillion). This was the debt inherited by President Clinton when he took the oath of office on January 20, 1993. On the same date in 1981, Algerian aircraft left Teheran in Iran with fifty-five hostages held at the U.S. Embassy by Iran for 444 days. Carter had frozen Iranian assets in the United States and negotiated endlessly with their captors. The release of the hostages came too late to help Carter get reelected, but it did help Reagan to begin his administration on a triumphant note. There may be no better way to exalt Reagan's accomplishments while in office than by reading his own words. One may browse the Internet and find a Home Page for Ronald Reagan. According to the text, it had been "visited" 67678 times since March 24, 1995. Apparently, the Great Communicator himself did not edit the text. In a section dedicated to praising the Standard of Living, the text states: "Poverty rates also show a marked improvement during the [1981-89] expansion, despite what you may have heard from the liberal media." According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States for 1996, the number of people (white, black, and Hispanic) below the poverty level increased in almost every year between 1981 (31.8 million) and 1992 (39.3 million). Children under 18 years of age were hardest hit. The redistribution of both wealth and income became more and more skewed in favor of a diminishing number of people. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer. During his eight years as president, Reagan made certain the Supreme Court was in conservative hands. While Nixon appointed William Rehnquist, it was Reagan who elevated him the position of Chief Justice. Reagan also appointed Antonin Scalia, Sandra Day O'Connor, and Anthony Kennedy. Later President Bush appointed David Souter and Clarence Thomas. In the twelve years from 1980 to 1992, either Reagan or Bush appointed about 60 percent of the federal judiciary -- courts of appeal, district courts, the Tax Court and the Court of Claims. In 1995, Occidental Chemical Company agreed to pay $129 million in cleanup costs for Love Canal, a site near Niagara Falls in New York. The settlement agreement all but ended sixteen years of litigation. Actually, toxic waste had been dumped in Love Canal as far back as World War II. Homes had been built on the polluted site and sold to unsuspecting buyers. With the discovery of hazardous and toxic waste, the residents had to move out. The Federal Emergency Management Agency handled the


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residential relocation, and it will receive $27 million under the settlement agreement approved by the District Court. The Environmental Protection Agency will receive the rest for money spent on cleanup, $102 million. Corporate America, its stockholders, and its officers were the principal beneficiaries of the Reagan-Bush years. Possibly the greatest redistribution of wealth and income in American history occurred in this twelve-year period. In the 1960s and 1970s, Congress enacted laws to protect the environment from further degradation. The National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Toxic Waste Act, and the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA)were only six such laws. CERCLA established standards to determine liability for the costs of pollution cleanup. Litigation to compel corporate America to comply with these laws has occupied the time and energy of the federal courts and environmental organizations ever since 1969. With a few exceptions, corporate America sued to avoid compliance. In cases reaching the Supreme Court, it often narrowed the reach of environmental laws. Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Corporation v. Natural Resources Defense Council,Inc., 435 U.S. 519 (1978). There, it held that while the National Environmental Policy Act established "significant substantive [environmental] goals for the nation," it, in fact, only "imposed responsibilities that were essentially procedural." In another case, Agins v. City of Tiburon, California, 447 U.S. 255 (1980), landowners appealed a decision of the California Supreme Court that held zoning restrictions did not represent a Fifth Amendment "taking." The Supreme Court affirmed, noting that "the determination that governmental action constitutes a taking is, in essence, a determination that the public at large, rather than a single owner, must bear the burden of an exercise of state power in the public interest." In 1973, Congress enacted the Endangered Species Act. It protects those birds, animals, and other creatures against threatened extinction. The snail darter is an endangered species and no action, such as the construction of a dam, may be taken that would threaten the snail darter with extinction. In Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill, 437 U.S. 153 (1978) the Supreme Court held it could not defer to an administrative agency's expertise to independently weigh the costs and benefits of preserving the snail darter compared to the construction of a dam. Only Congress may create exceptions to an absolute rule. Ever since, corporate America has tried to weaken the Endangered Species Act by amendment or repeal. During this period, these same


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interests have tried to find a way around compliance. The northern spotted owl's journey through the courts is a symbol of what it takes to compel compliance. In one case, a federal judge in 1991 described a "remarkable series of violations of the environmental laws" by the federal agencies entrusted with administering public forests of the United States and protecting species against extinction. Seattle Audubon Society v. Evans, 771 F. Supp. 1081, 1089 (W.D, Wash. 1991), affirmed at 952 F.2nd 297 (9th Cir. 1991). During the Bush years, the fight to secure compliance involved a shadowy political battle in Congress. Corporate America sought to obtain exemptions from laws the courts found the federal agencies were violating. During the Reagan-Bush years, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service colluded with various members of corporate America to allow clear-cutting of old growth timber. At the same time, corporate America and these government agencies resisted every effort to list the northern spotted owl as threatened within the meaning of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). In 1995, the Supreme Court finally agreed that the Fish and Wildlife Service adopt a regulation in 1975 that protected both the spotted owl and red-cockaded woodpecker. Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Greater Oregon, 115 S. Ct. 2407 (1995). Those who brought the action were small landowners, logging companies and families dependent on the forest products industries in the Northwest and Southeast area of the country. Their complaint alleged that application of the regulation defining habitat modification as a prohibited act had injured them economically. They had challenged the statutory validity of Secretary of the Interior's regulation defining "harm." Both species were finally protected by law. The Supreme Court held only that the regulation defining "harm" was reasonable and included modification of the habitat of the spotted owl and the red-cockaded woodpecker. During the time Reagan was associated with Hollywood, he was a member of the Screen Actors Guild and appeared in B-movies like One More for the Gipper in the 1930s. He also appeared in Star Wars, another B-movie of the 1939-40 series of like mass appeal. In this one, Reagan played the part of a Secret Service agent in a film with a contemporary ending. A mystery ray gun capable of shooting enemy aircraft down was the secret weapon protected by the character played by Reagan. Some historians claimed that fantasy weapons like the ray gun supplied Reagan with the missing link to his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in 1985, often described as "Star Wars." This initiative cost taxpayers billions of dollars with nothing to show for all this federal largesse to keep "the Evil Empire" of the old Soviet Union at bay. This phrase was used as


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the United States refused to concede it had lost the war in Vietnam; through violence and masculine strength, defeat could be redeemed, transformed into victory in other larger fields of battle. In Rambo, Sylvester Stallone as the hero protecting the children of the next generation from some technological horror. Like everything Hollywood produced, the bottomline was money, not any cultural message. And people nationally are upset by the violence of television and the sex of films corrupt our "values." And Star Wars is not yet dead. In December, 1995, conservatives have resorted to televised ads to persuade Congress to revive key elements of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). In fact, the Senate has passed a measure already approved by the House authorizing the Pentagon to spend $438 million to develop an SDI system by 2003. Even in 1983 when Reagan offhandedly proposed this system, it included space-based sensors capable of detecting enemy warheads speeding toward the United States high above the atmosphere, as well as heatseeking missiles that could destroy them. The estimated cost of an SDI system by 2002 was $40 billion. However, $30 billion had already been spent between 1983 and 1995. Reagan gave his infamous "Evil Empire" speech to the House of Commons in London on June 8, 1982. The text retrieved from The Reagan Home Page on the Internet appears to have been sanitized by removal of the phrase. However, its title incorporated it: "The Reagan Home Page: Evil Empire Speech." Reagan was in London to sell the idea of reducing the number of strategic ballistic missile warheads. What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term -- the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Lenism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies....And that's why we must continue our efforts to strengthen NATO even as we move forward with our zero-option initiative in the negotiations on intermediate-range forces and our proposal for a one-third reduction in strategic ballistic missile warheads.

In 1968, the United States signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and it was ratified by the Senate. Article I states in part: "Each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices ....to any other state. The treaty was to last for 25 years, but Article X of the NPT allows any party to withdraw from the treaty if it decides "that extraordinary events related to the subject matter of this treaty have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country." In 1972, the United States and the then Soviet Union signed SALT I, and one of its most important components was the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty which was ratified by the Senate after President Nixon and Leonid Breszhnev, General Secretaty of the Communist Party, Soviet Union had both signed SALT I. Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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The ABM treaty regulated anti-ballistic missiles that theoretically could be used to destroy incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The treaty limited each side to only one ABM deployment site and 100 interceptor missiles. These limitations prevented either party from defending more than a small fraction of its entire territory, and thus kept both sides subject to the deterrent effect of the other's strategic forces. Not by coincidence, the entire nuclear deterrence system bore the acronym, MAD, for mutually assured destruction. In the closing days of 1995, a group of conservative Republicans threatened to upset the uneasy equilibrium of the ABM Treaty and add complications to securing an unconditional renewal of the NPT. They have recommended renewed research and deployment of the Reagan-inspired Star Wars Initiative. Congress sent President Clinton a defense appropriation measure that Clinton vetoed. It contained monety for Reagan's Star Wars proposal. In his veto message, Clinton stated that an Anti-Ballistic Missile of the sort proposed by Star Wars proponents, would be a violation of the ABM Treaty. In turn, this fact could in turn trigger a withdrawal from the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) on the part of Moscow. Newlyelected members of the Duma and militant Communists like General Alexandr Lebed applauded on the sidelines. Secretary of Defense William Perry addressed the threa t problem in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 1, 1995. His testimony appears in Defense Issues, Vol. 10, Number 25. In part, the Secretary stated: With the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the world has begun to move away from that dangerous state of affairs. The nuclear threat to the United States was now greatly reduced and of a different form. Cooperative efforts to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union have contributed greatly to U.S. security. These developments, however, are neither complete nor irreversible. Russia's transformation to a stable democracy and a market economy is still in its early stages. The Russian arsenal remains the only force capable of threatening U.S. national survival. Furthermore, the spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction now poses a larger and growing threat to U.S. and global security. The former Soviet Union is a potential source of nuclear material for states eager to develop their own nuclear capability. We must avoid a return to the large arsenals of the Cold War and prevent proliferation of such weapons.

SDI, if expanded, could produce nuclear instability. The development and deployment of the Star Wars anti-ballistic missiles or space-based sensors to direct them to any incoming ICBM would threaten the other members of the nuclear club. It seems very much as though some of the proponents of Star Wars technology actually believed the disinformation sent to three presidents by tainted CIA national estimates.


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In 1985, Aldrich Ames of the CIA went to work for the KGB. For at least ten years, until his conviction for espionage in 1995, Ames sold Moscow nearly every secret about American espionage activities in Russia. With his help, the KGB insinuated volumes of false information into the United States intelligence-gathering system, some of it reaching, as the media suggest, three past presidents of this country. Some of this information heavily influenced American defense spending and foreign policy decisions during the 1980s. As misleading information spiralled into the agency from sources controlled by the KGB, CIA analysts passed it up the line to policy makers without any disclaimers, even in cases where the sources were knowingly tainted. It would be difficult to imagine a more effective way of incapacitating the CIA and blinding the American government. There is no publicly-disclosed report on the nature and extent of Ames' treachery; nor is there likely to be one, given the secrecy in which the CIA operates. Reagan could serve only two terms as president by virtue of the Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution adopted in 1951. However, his vice-president was George Bush who had every intention of running for the office of president in 1988. The Democrats nominated Michael Dukakis, a successful governor of Massachusetts. Bush retained Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes as campaign strategists. They relied on what the mainstream press described as "sleazy gutter politics." This team wasted no time on the niceties of political conduct on the campaign trail. Willie Horton was a convicted killer. Under Massachusetts law, Horton could be furloughed and had been on eight different occasions without incident. On the ninth furlough he was arrested in a stolen car and charged with rape of the car owner's fiancé. Atwater made certain that Dukakis got saddled with the blame for Willie Horton's crime. Dukakis was seen as soft on crime. Horton was black, so his crime became almost a nationwide household word as various writers spread the story. The Bush campaign aired a "revolving door justice" television ad and kept the pressure on Dukakis right up through the presidential election campaign in November. Bush got 53.4 percent of the popular vote and 426 electoral votes. Dukakis trailed badly and got only 111 electoral votes with 45.6 percent of the popular vote. George Bush was sworn in as president on January 20, 1989. Dan Quayle was his vice president. President Bush had been the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1970s and probably should have foreseen the collapse of the Soviet empire and communism itself. The incumbent General Secretary of the Communist Party, Konstantin Chernenko, died in March, 1985. Mikhail Gorbachev was poised to take over and was sponsored by Andrei Gromyko, a thorough Stalinist. Gorbachev openly argued that Lenin was to be admired; yet Gorbachev was welcomed by Bush like a new star in the heavens. General Dmitri Volkogonov, formerly propaganda chief of


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the Red Army, had quite different views about both Lenin and Stalin. They appear in his books, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy published in 1995 and another about Lenin published in 1994, Lenin: A New Biography. Volkogonov described both as monsters who killed to maintain their own power, but it was Lenin was really the father of Russian terrorism, merciless and totalitarian. Lenin never lived long enough to have authorized the killing of the royal family and thousands of others. Lenin certainly knew about the regicide. He died in 1923. Stalin died in 1953 and must accept the responsibility of authorizing the killing of millions of Russians. Gorbachev's belief in party reform via heresy in 1988 -- he advocated perestroika (restructuring) -- clearly presaged the collapse of communism. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1989. Mikhail Gorbachev, who was popular in the United States, lasted about five years. His successor as General Secretary of the Communist Party was Boris Yeltsin. Actually, his title was changed to president after a free election in which Yeltsin was elected by a significant margin. Late in 1995, Yeltsin appointed Yevgeny Primakov as Foreign Minister. Primakov was an Arabic-speaking spy who worked with the KGB and advanced in power by riding the right horses. One of them was Saddam Hussein who wanted United Nations sanctions against Iraq lifted so he could buy Soviet arms with cash from sales of Iraqi oil. Further elections in Russia occurred in June, 1996, and some knowledgeable people predicted civil war if Yeltsin lost. Right now, China is Russia's biggest arms customer. It uses hard currency from trade with the United States to buy tanks, aircraft and other military hardware from Russia. Neither China nor Russia has a human rights policy, but Russia will use its political clout to head off or veto any condemnation of China's abysmal record in human rights. Primakov may succeed bringing about a new and cordial relationship between Moscow and Beijing. In 1955, Mao split with Moscow, calling Khrushkev a revisionist. Russian nationalists may yet take Russia back to Stalinist orthodoxy. Fortunately, General Dmitri Volkogonov has written a detailed account of Stalin's bloody régime. Volkogonov had access to the highest sources in writing his books, and Gorbachev had the same or better access to intelligence sources, including KGB files. Presumably he used these sources in writing his own book, Perestroika: New Thinking published in 1988. This book talked in terms of restructuring and glasnost, openness in public affairs. Both concepts in reality contradicted the very basis of party rule. And soon, Gorbachev paid the price. David Pryce-Jones commented on this situation in his book The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire published in 1995. "Gorbachev's


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reforms were in the direction of law and accountability," he wrote. "By that yardstick, the KGB would stand exposed as the criminal organization that it was, not only for its terrorization in the past, but for its position above the law in the present. The last chairman of the KGB, Vladimir Kryuchkov, duly joined the other conspirators in the coup in August, 1991. Its purpose was to restore the absolute power of the [Communist] Party and the secret police." One might think that the Central Intelligence Agency was capable of analyzing the massive documentation behind a coup, but it was probably occupied elsewhere. Or President Bush was too busy organizing his reelection campaign during 1992 after the anti-Gorbachev coup. Bush's New World Order was very much on his mind, a society dedicated to peace and security, freedom and the rule of law. Apparently, the president forgot that he had authorized the attack on Panama in 1989 in violation of international law. And the Kremlin took advantage of the American presence in the Persian Gulf War with all its complexities to order a crackdown in the Baltic states heading off any third party challenge to this remaining part of its empire. The Soviet conspirators acted only after Central European countries had won their freedom from communist rule. East Germans, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Bulgarians, and Rumanians, for the most part, gained their freedom without violence. However, the elections in later years marked a resurgence of hardline Communists in Hungary and Rumania. East German elections occurred in 1990, and unsurprisingly, the Germans voted for reunification. It may have been a mistake. If one eliminates the make-work projects authorized in Bonn, unemployment in East Germany hovers around 50 percent in 1996. The great playwright, Václev Havel was elected president of Czechoslovakia, and Hungary had its first free elections in 1990. Poland's Solidarity movement rejected Communism overwhelmingly in 1990, though it surfaced again in 1995. In 1994, Slovakia negotiated its divorce from Czechoslovakia, and Havel presides over the Czech Republic. Recovery from forty years of Communist rule in what was Czechoslovakia was difficult. The Russians left the environment in ruins. Prague's water and air are still polluted. However, in one area, book publishing, recovery has shown progress. Before 1989, the Czech distribution apparatus was choked with books published by and for Communists. Writers like Ivan Klima and Josef Skvorecky were graduates of the underground press who flourished during and after Communist censorship. Klima, for example, was Jewish and spent some time in a German concentration camp. That experience plus life under Communism shaped his writing as he explains in The Spirit of Prague. Skvorechy has written many books, of which Talking Moscow Blues may be the best.


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Communist censors, for reasons clear to no one, considered the saxophone a decadent musical instrument. Yet in this book, he writes about local orchestras either playing without the sax or fighting the censors. The American Booksellers Association sent representatives of the American publishing industry to Prague where, with individual help, they restored Czech publishing to good health. In 1994, a PEN International Congress convened in Prague with writers from all over the world in attendance. The Cold War finally ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Without Force or Lies: Voices from the Revolution of Central Europe in 1989 edited by William M. Brinton and Alan Rinzler, told the story of this historical transition with essays by Andrei Sakharov, Václav Havel, Norman Manea, Reiner Kunze, G‰nter Grass, Adam Michnik, and many others in this book published by Mercury House in 1990. The press trumpeted the end of the Cold War, and politicians followed suit with talk of a peace dividend. George Kennan, however, offered a sober analysis in his book, At a Century's End: Reflections 1982 to 1995. He wrote that Cold War policies were carried out at a frightful cost to the American people. We paid with forty years of enormous and otherwise unnecessary military expenditures. We paid through the cultivation of nuclear weaponry to the point where the vast and useless nuclear arsenal had become (and remains today) a danger to the very environment of the planet...

During the period of domestic readjustment to a peace time economy, Iraq's dictator, Saddam Hussein, attacked and occupied Kuwait on August 2, 1990. President Bush told the nation on television that Hussein's naked aggression could not be allowed to stand. Various resolutions of the United Nations Security Council established a framework within which Bush mobilized the West to evict Iraqi troops from Kuwait. After bombing Baghdad and Iraqi armed forces relentlessly, Bush ordered the coalition forces with token Arab units to advance on all fronts. His order was dated January 16, 1991. By February 28, 1991 Iraqi troops had been routed, and possession of Kuwait was restored to its corrupt monarchy. The president ordered a cease fire leaving Iraqi forces in possession of aircraft, tanks, and artillery then used by Hussein to slaughter Kurds and Shi'ite Moslems within Iraq. Most of the weapons used in this genocidal killing were those dual use weapons -- civilian and military -- exported by American arms merchants. All these arms merchants needed was a permit of the Bush Department of Commerce. American helicopters were prominent on the list of permits disclosed by Commerce. Not long after the United States began withdrawing its forces from Saudi Arabia, the anti-Gorbachev coup ended in 1991 with his ouster and the accession of


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Boris Yeltsin. The American presidential election in 1992 was only a year away. From a high approval rate of his performance in Iraq, George Bush rapidly lost ground in the polls. Voters had become more aware of domestic economic problems. Working America was losing ground to a recession that probably began in early 1990. Also, in the last twenty years, the rate of economic progress, as measured by the statistics of wages and family income, were gloomy. They showed that economic growth had slowed greatly compared with any time since the Civil War. Productivity - the output of goods and services the economy produces per hour of work -- had declined from an annual average rate since 1870 of 2.25 percent to 1 percent in 1973, less than half of its historical rate. Thus, working America earned far less in the twenty years since 1973 than it would have with productivity at an historic low. Jeffrey Madrick goes into this problem in depth in his book The End of Affluence published in 1994 by Random House.Had productivity grown at 2.0 percent since 1973, a typical family of four would have earned an estimated $60,000 more a year than it did and more than $5,000 in 1995 alone. In fact, wages have stagnated since at least 1985. In effect, the United States has two economies existing side-by-side, one poor or living close to the poverty line, the other working harder at lower pay just to stay ahead of inflation. A third economy consists of about 5 percent of the nation's population in 1995, about 13,000,000 people who own an estimated 65 percent of the income and wealth of the United States, perhaps more. Thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands of working Americans have been laid off in the last fifteen years since 1980, and those still working share a deep sense of unease and insecurity about their future. In 1992, the actual presidential campaign featured George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot. Clinton was elected with 43 percent of the popular vote of 104.4 million people and 370 electoral votes. Bush got 37.4 percent of the popular vote and 168 electoral votes. Perot got 18 percent of the popular vote and no electoral votes. The 1992 campaign will be remembered for many reasons; one of them was communications. During the campaign, Bill Clinton made extensive use of both radio and television talk shows on a scale never-before used. Curiously, Reagan and Bush were presidents during the period the communications infrastructure expanded at an exponential rate, but George Bush did not make use of the new digital communications available in 1992. Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator, didn't need to; he was amiable and forgetful at times, but he was well liked. Bill Clinton promised a new covenant with the people, and voters believed him.


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Domestically, and during the Reagan-Bush years, the 1980s also marked the beginning of truly massive entertainment conglomerates. In 1985, for example, News Corporation of America, founded by Australian magnate Rupert Murdoch took over the film and television operations of 20th Century Fox. A few years later, Sony Corporation acquired the Columbia Pictures and Tri-Star film companies, and shortly thereafter, Japan's Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. purchased MCA-Universal. Warner Communication, parent company of Warner Brothers, merged with Time, Inc. to become Time Warner, Inc. In 1987, Gulf+Western renamed itself Paramount and acquired Simon & Schuster, one of America's largest publishers of trade books. Random House was the other. In the early 1990s, Paramount was the target of a hostile takeover by QVC, a cable network, and Viacom, another cable network. Viacom prevailed, and the combination was Paramount Communications with its huge library of films. There is little doubt that technology drove all these business combinations. With the expansion of cable bandwidth -- more channels on both television and cable -- these companies had to have access to content to entertain viewers between televised sports, such as football, basketball, baseball, hockey, tennis, and golf. By the year 2000, entertainment broadly defined will probably be the largest industry in the United States. This and other industries will be propelled by a technology that was familiar to only a handful of entrepreneurs before 1980. Thomas Watson of International Business Machines was one of them, and Bill Gates of Microsoft was another. In 1980, Compact Computer was no more than a gleam in someone's eye, but in ten years its sales of personal computers led the pack. IBM was in trouble, because of its corporate culture and its failure to see that the personal computer would someday be even more powerful than all but a few mainframe computers. Steven Jobs was one of the founders of Apple Computer Corporation which is showing signs of corporate aging, while Hewlett-Packard, founded in a garage in 1965, is now a giant. Toward the end of the decade of the 1980s, multimedia technology surfaced. It represented a marriage of the telephone, film, and the computer. By using a Compact Disk-Read Only Memory (CD-ROM), a user could receive a combination of text, sound, photos, and video footage. Hardly anyone knew what to do with this new technology, and some book publishers were thinking of publishing the last book and closing down. It hasn't happened and won't; there will probably be some textbooks on CD -- ROMs. But no one wants to read fiction on a computer monitor or hear someone reading perfectly visible text as it scrolls across or down the screen. The CD-ROM has been used mostly for storing information. The Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Bowker's Books in Print Plus Reviews, and the Encylopedia Britiannica have all been


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reduced to one such medium, and there will undoubtedly be many more such uses. One of them is a history of the war in Vietnam on CD-ROM narrated by Dan Rather. It will have sound, video clips, photos, essays and articles from the New York Times with field dispatches and cultural icons of the era. Bill Clinton and those who close to him during the 1992 campaign understood the high impact of effective communications in the new media. Just before the election, for example, his staff produced and sold a CDROM with video clips of key scenes in the campaign beginning before the New Hampshire primary of February, 1992. Clinton saw himself as the agent of change moving the economy closer to the American dream. The American dream meant an economy in which people who work hard can get ahead and each new generation lives better than the last one. It also meant a political system in which most people feel they can affect public decisions and elect officials who will speak for them. In her 1992 book, Reviving the American Dream: The Economy, the States & the Federal Government, Alice M. Rivlin wrote: In recent years, the dream has been fading. Americans are worried about their economic future and they should be. For nearly two decades, the much-vaunted American economy has been performing below par. Wage earners have found their takehome pay buying less. Families have kept up their standard of living by working more hours and having both spouses in the work force. Young people look at their job prospects and wonder whether they will do as well as their parents or will be able to own a house. Parents worry about their children's future. Many children face bleak futures; one in five now lives in poverty. Pocketbook worries are compounded by fear that the quality of American life is deteriorating. Violence is pervasive; city streets and parks are unsafe; drug addiction is epidemic; racial tensions are high. Toxic wastes, dirty air, and traffic gridlock increase the hazards and reduce the enjoyment of daily living, especially in densely populated areas. The American democratic system, though admired around the world, is not confronting the public problems that concern its citizens most. The federal government can lead an international coalition to victory in the Middle East, but appears far less decisive at home. The budget deficit has paralyzed policy for more then a decade. Neither major political party has a convincing domestic agenda; neither can articulate a clear view of what the federal government ought to do. State and local governments are not sure of their roles, but are being forced to cut their activities in the face of serious financial crises.

Having said all this in 1992, Alice Rivlin went to work for Bill Clinton in early 1993. Initially, she headed the presidential Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The last person leaving Clinton's Transition Office in Little Rock, Arkansas heard the refrain, "It's the economy, stupid." For the years between 1992 and 1994, this phrase may have been useful, but all


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this changed in 1995, when a Republican Congress took over for the first time in forty years.

William Jefferson Clinton was sworn in as president at noon, January 20, 1993. He had won the 1992 presidential election with 42 percent of the popular vote. Ross Perot got 18 percent, and George Bush got 40 percent. Congressional districts had been reapportioned to reflect the Census of 1990. The Constitution requires a decennial census, primarily to establish a basis for apportionment of the House of Representatives among the states.Since 1960, the total membership of the House has been 435. Without the addition of any new state, this is the number that will be apportioned by the Census of the year 2000. The Senate has two members from each of the fifty states. The population of the United States in 1992 was about 255,407,000 people on that date according to the Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1995. Of this total, 48.8 percent were men, and 51.2 percent were women. The population by race in 1992 was 83.5 percent white, 12.4 percent black, and Other was 4.1 percent. The total population included about 24 million people of Hispanic origin. The Bureau of the Census divides the nation into geographical regions, of which the sixteen states of the South is one region. It had a population of 88,153,000 people, the largest total -- about 34 percent of the total -- of all four regions. The other three were the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West. The sixteen states of the South were Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) estimated that there were 3,379,000 undocumented aliens in the United States as of October, 1992. About a third of them came from Mexico and arrived first in California. In current dollars, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for 1992 was about $6.02 trillion. However, in early 1996, the Department of Commerce introduced a revised method of calculating GDP, or rather its annual growth announced quarterly and annualized. As a result, the new method of calculating the GDP (a chain-weighted calculation instead of a fixed-weight) allows Commerce to account for price changes continuously instead of at five-year intervals. Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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Accordingly, in 1992, the GDP grew 2.7 percent, not the 2.2 percent used by Commerce. In 1991, the GDP declined by 1 percent, and the country was in the depths of a recession while George Bush was president. In 1992 the economy was actually growing, but he deferred acknowledging this recession in 1991. Bush finally requested action in 1992,eg., lowering interest rates, several months before the election. This belated acknowledgment of a recession was just one reason for his defeat. Economists, at least all those who find the new method acceptable, have had to reexamine their figures on productivity -- output per worker per hour -- running at 2.2 percent a year in the 1980s. The actual growth of productivity under the new method was an anemic 1.2 percent for the 1990s, hardly better than the 1980s when rapid economic expansion was driven by rapid increases in employment. Manufacturing productivity for the 1979-90 period was only 2.6 percent. President Clinton addressed this problem in his State of the Union address to Congress on January 23, 1996. Amongst other things, he asked for interest rate adjustments to stimulate a weaker than expected economy. Over a month after Clinton's State of the Union speech, the Department of Labor announced that Americans' productivity rose 1.1 percent in 1995, the best showing since 1992. Productivity measures output per hours worked. A hypothetical example illustrates the importance of productivity. If it took 10 workers to produce one automobile in 15 hours in 1994, slightly less than 10 workers -- about 9.9 workers -- could still produce one auto in 15 hours, a slight improvement. Higher productivity means that employers can pay workers more because they are more efficient. But if productivity is stagnant, then wages and standards of living are stagnant as well. Employers are reluctant to increase wages, unless productivity increases. In 1992, the Treasury from all sources had $1.090 trillion in receipts to finance operations of the federal government. Congress authorized expenditures for fiscal year 1992 of $1.380 trillion, producing a deficit of $290.403 billion, or 23.3 percent of the nation's GDP. By January, 1993, the gross federal debt was about $4.002 trillion. Deficits for each of the three following years -- 1993, 1994, and 1995 -- declined by significant amounts; they were $255 billion, $203 billion, and $192 billion respectively, while the gross federal debt reached $4.9 trillion by the end of fiscal year 1995. The figures or revenue from taxes from all sources are complete through 1993. For 1992 and 1993, Table 532 shows that from all sources, the Internal Revenue Service received $1.121 trillion and $1.177 trillion respectively for these years. These sources were principally individual and corporate income taxes employment taxes, excise, and estate taxes. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress made a commitment to the poor in passing the


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law requiring cash benefits to those families having funds insufficient to buy the basic necessities of life. This program is now known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Over the years, Congress added benefits and increased the monthly payments to those on this welfare. By 1993, Congress approved payments to 14,257,000 recipients at a cost to taxpayers of $22.106 billion in that year. Approximately, 9 million of the recipients were children. By 1993, some 26.9 million people were beneficiaries of the Food Stamp Program which had a cost to taxpayers of about $22 billion. The National School Lunch Program covered 25.4 million in 1993 and cost $3.9 billion. Since July of 1966, the federal Medicare program has provided medical care to all those over 65 years of age. Under Medicaid, all states offer basic health services to certain very poor people. Medicaid eligibility is automatic for almost all cash welfare beneficiaries. Social Security, also initiated by President Roosevelt in 1935, is another entitlement program; if a citizen meets all the statutory criteria, he or she is entitled to the benefits of social security at a certain age. When Social Security and Medicare were first established as entitlements, the actuaries made a major mistake. Demography is the villain. The Baby Boomers will reach 65 by the year 2010, and the Social Security Fund will begin its slow slide into insolvency. And all citizens are living longer because most of them are getting better medical care. So the Medicare Fund will begin running out of money by the year 2013, or sooner. Hardly anyone likes struggling with statistics in the text, but for reasons that should be obvious, the statistics really needed by all citizens often appear only occasionally in the print media and hardly ever in the mass media. Politicians discuss the subject in terms so elliptical that critics don't get it. With the end of the Cold War in 1989, the Bush Administration struggled unsuccessfully to convert America's Cold War economy to peacetime production. The so-called peace dividend never materialized. The Pentagon continued its wasteful ways. In current dollars, the Defense Department outlays for FY1990, 1991 and 1992 were $299.3 billion, $273.3 billion, and $298.4 billion respectively. In 1992, the Environmental Protection Agency had about 1,200 hazardous waste sites on its National Priority List. New Jersey led the list, closely followed by New York, California, and Florida. This listing is authorized for the Superfund -cleanup -- program by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) of 1980. While the spotted owl started its journey through the courts in 1987, it was not until 1991 that this much maligned owl got the protection Congress designed for it. Seattle Audubon Society v. Evans, 771 F.Supp. 1081 (W.D.Wash), affirmed 932 F.2nd 297 (9th Cir. 1991). It was in this


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case that one federal judge described the proceedings as "a remarkable series of violations of the environmental laws" by the federal agencies entrusted with administering our public forests and protecting species from extinction. Between 1988 and 1992, the Ninth Circuit Court considered two court-stripping measures embodied in annual appropriations bills in six published opinions, and even the Supreme Court stepped in to resolve one case. The spotted owl was the symbol of protection of species. However, soil erosion as a result of poor forest management practices played a major role in the drama of saving the ancient old-growth trees of Washington, Oregon, and California. Soil erosion from clear cutting these trees was a major environmental threat to the sustainability and productive capacity of agriculture. During the last forty years, nearly one-third of the world's arable land has been lost by erosion and continues to be lost at a rate of more than 10 million hectares per year. One hectare is equal to 2.471 acres. With the addition of a quarter of a million people each day, the world population's food demand is increasing at a time when per capita food productivity is beginning to decline. Croplands in the United States lose soil at an average rate of 17 tons per hectare per year. About 90 percent of American crop land is losing soil above the sustainable rate. In 1798, Malthus, a clergyman and demographer, believed that population would increase geometrically while the means of subsistence -- food -would increase at an arithmetical rate and that this would result in an inadequate supply of the goods supporting life unless war, famine, or disease reduced the population. In his book, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 20th Century Robert D. Kaplan writes of one small project to restore the land to its natural, undegraded state. Rishi Valley, in India, is a few hours south of Hyderabab. Rishi Valley is the hub for a system of satellite schools for children. Each year, the children plant twenty thousand custard apple trees. This variety has a strong root system and keeps the soil from eroding. On each site, check dams are built to slow or stop the flow of rivulets after a rain. The soil from these rivulets form deposits of nutrientrich silt which is very fertile. The rich silt is transported to dry areas that need regeneration. The students even produce their own organic compost by collecting all the school's garbage in cement-lined pits, where it is consumed by earth worms. Sloping stone walls channel the flood water to percolation tanks where it replenishes the aquifer water level. The people at Rishi Valley do not use either irrigation or artificial fertilizers. The area, with its satellite schools, is a huge organic farm that raises money by selling its own produce and reinvesting the proceeds. The schools are really extensions of the home, and the literacy rate of villagers has reached 86 percent. As a result, they have a birth rate of less than 2 percent; they understand family planning. Bougainvillea and hibiscus are planted


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around the schools to beautify the site. A teacher observed that people who appreciate beauty are less likely to be violent. Each satellite school has a flower, fruit, and vegetable nursery, which the students and their parents are responsible for. The nurseries generate income sufficient to make each school almost self-sustaining. India's Green Revolution had dangerously depleted the nation's environmental base through overuse of irrigation and chemical fertilizers. Rishi Valley was a successful reversal of this process, an act of regeneration. America might consider learning how Rishi Valley works and apply the knowledge to regenerate depleted areas where clear cutting of trees led to soil erosion and loss of arable land. The United States also has other problems. There were approximately 1.225 million births to unmarried women in 1992, about 31 percent of all live births without regard to economic status, i.e., on or off welfare. Nationally, 6.8 percent of the workforce was unemployed in 1993, but higher in industrial and defense-related states like California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, and New York. Although the United States was emerging from a recession in 1992 and had not yet adjusted to peacetime production, it was certainly the richest and most powerful nation in the world, a superpower. Against this backdrop of laws and Congressionally-approved programs that Bill Clinton inherited on January 20, 1993 the president saw a comparatively healthy economy with the market recovering nicely from its recession low. The Dow Jones industrial average for sixty-five corporations closed on January 20, 1993 at 3241; almost exactly three years later the Dow Jones closed at 5216, a record high. This new high didn't help the roughly 75 percent of the adult population living without owning any stock at all. The Federal Reserve Board reported in 1992 that American households own about 25 percent of all corporate equities including mutual funds. In the twelve years from 1980 to 1992, the United States has seen the greatest redistribution of wealth in its history. In New York City, for example, the median income for the richest fifth of its population was 21.04 times the median income for the poorest fifth in 1990. In Los Angeles, the ratio was 18.05; in Chicago, it was 18.27; in Houston, it was 17.44; in Philadelphia, it was 15.74; in San Diego, it was 12.07; in Detroit, it was 20.47; in Dallas, it was 16.59; in Phoenix, it was 11.86; and in San Antonio, it was 14.63. At least in urban America, the middle class underwent a process of erosion by a significant amount in the twelve-year period in which Reagan and Bush occupied the White House. In fact, the middle class was far more concerned with job security than foreign policy during the 1992 presidential campaign. The middle class saw President Bush spending their tax dollars to subdue a remote Iraqi dictator in 1990 and 1991. Those earning $35,000 to $65,000 a year were too busy trying to keep their own heads above the water. Bush even


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forgave $7 billion in debt owed by Egypt and paid by American taxpayers, the price paid to make Egypt a participant in the American-led coalition. The Persian Gulf War was over by March of 1991 -- withdrawal of American troops began then -- but Saddam Hussein was still very much in power. The ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia continued, and only Haiti was a cloud on the horizon. President Bush sent American troops to Somalia for the humanitarian purpose of forcing local thugs to share relief supplies sent to relieve those dying of starvation. Food and medicine were shipped to Somalia by generous governments to relieve starvation and disease in Somalia. However, these humanitarian supplies were appropriated by local thugs as they were unloaded at the water front and sold on the black market. In late 1991, President Bush once again exploited his Southern strategy by nominating Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Named chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by Reagan and a federal judge -- District of Columbia Court of Appeals -- by Bush, Thomas was a product of affirmative action, a policy he rejected for others. Lewis Lapham of Harper's Magazine called the nomination "puppet theater" with Thomas "dancing in the strings once occupied by Willie Horton....the President apparently thinks he can play at racial politics as if it were a game of horseshoes." Despite credible evidence from Anita Hill, an Oklahoma law professor, that she had been sexually harrassed by Thomas, the Senate confirmed his nomination. See Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson. Its authors believed Anita Hill and made a sound case for rejecting Thomas. At home, however, Clinton inherited other, less visible problems. In 1992, there were 38.014 million people living below the poverty level. Some 14 million of these were children. The National Center for Children in Poverty publishes statistics and commentary. Its Child Poverty News & Issues: Winter 1995, Vol. 5, No.1 states that "....once again the harsh reality that propels the Center's work -- the continued growth in the number of U.S. children under six living in poverty -- between 1987 and 1992, the number of poor children under six grew from 5 to 6 million, and the poverty rate for children under six reached 26 percent." In 1996 the number of poor children under six was about 8 million. In 1992, the poverty line was $9,137 for a family of two, $11,186 for a family of three, and $14,335 for a family of four." Dr. J. Lawrence Aber, the Center's new director, cautioned that the increasing number of poor young children reflects a 20-year trend that is having devastating consequences. "The significance of these figures for our society," he said, "cannot be overstated because we will pay the costs for the next several


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decades. Poverty gives rise to many types of deprivation, and many of our youngest, poorest children will suffer severe consequences in terms of their physical health and psychological development." Demographic patterns that are not consistent with public myths about poor children and their families exist everywhere. In 1992, for example, as many as 38 percent of poor children under six lived in families supported by earnings only -- and no cash public assistance -- and less than one-third of poor children under six lived in families that relied exclusively on cash public assistance for their incomes. Those in either category are the victims of stereotyping by politicians who want to end "welfare dependency." Herbert J. Gans notes this labeling in his book, The War Against the Poor, published in 1995 by an imprint of HarperCollins. Gans is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. He dedicated an entire chapter to the origin and use of the "underclass" label. In 1963, for example, Gunnar Myrdal used the word as an economic term to describe the victims of deindustrialization. "They are," he said, "an unpriviliged class of unemployed, unemployable, and underemployed who are more and more hopelessly set apart from the nation at large and do not share in its life, its ambitions, and its achievements." After its use by Mrydal in 1963, the word "underclass" was used in a conservative magazine The Public Interest, in 1973, in Time in 1977, and in the New Yorker in 1981, each such use expanding its meaning. Time, for example, did a cover story entitled, "The American Underclass: Destitute and Desperate in the Land of Plenty." In this 1977 cover story, its writers defined the label as a "large group of people who are more intractable, more socially alien and more hostile than almost anyone had imagined....Time indicated that this underclass is 'made up mostly of impoverished urban blacks who still suffer from the heritage of slavery." Thus, when Ken Auletta wrote a serious book entitled The Underclass, the meaning had a pejorative as well as a behavioural component. By 1982, the word had become useful in describing the culture of black poverty, and the labeling process was complete. Professor Gans described the process of value reinforcement and its role in isolating the undeserving poor from all the rest by behavioural norms. "When the undeserving poor violate, or are imagined to be violating, mainstream behavioral patterns and values," he wrote, "they help to reinforce and reaffirm the desirability of these patterns and values....a variety of norms, including those sometimes dismissed as 'motherhood' values, gain new prestige


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when they are violated and their violators stigmatized or punished...If the undeserving poor can be imagined to be lazy, they help to reaffirm the 'Protestant work ethic.; if poor singlefamilies are officially condemned, the two-parent family is once more legitimated as ideal...Before the undeserving poor can obtain financial help, one of the conventional prerequisites is visible indication of their readiness to practice mainstream values. For example, welfare recipients and the jobless must behave deferentially in government agencies even though public officials can insult them freely."

The phrase "welfare dependent" became a code word for welfare reform during the 1992 presidential campaign. Clinton, for example, promised such reform, and Bush echoed the same theme. Polls taken by both candidates showed almost 70 percent approval to ending welfare entirely. But when the Republicans moved into their post-1994 election majority in Congress and introduced legislation to actually end welfare, the story was quite different. Polls showed support dropping, if ending welfare worked a hardship on children. Welfare reform was not the only issue in which factual knowledge played a role. Consider, for example, Proposition 187 submitted to the voters of California in 1994. If approved by more than 50 percent of the voters, the language of Proposition 187 would be incorporated into the California Constitution. The stated purpose of Proposition 187 was to "provide for cooperation between [the]agencies of state and local government with the federal government, and to establish a system of required notification by and between such agencies to prevent illegal aliens in the United States from receiving benefits or public services in the State of California." Public schools and health care were effectively denied by Proposition 187. In the same year, Governor Pete Wilson sought reelection in California. His surveys showed him that Proposition 187 would pass by a healthy margin-it did-so he decided to come out strongly for its approval by California's voters. Wilson made anti-immigration a center piece of his campaign and won re-election as governor with 20 percent of the black vote -- twice the historic level of black support for Republican candidates. Despite the uniform and vehement opposition of black leaders to 187, California blacks split on the measure, 47 percent in favor and 53 percent against. Peter Skerry, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. wrote an article for the New Republic's issue of January 20, 1995. It was entitled "The Black Alienation." For part of his article, Skerry turned to sociologist William Wilson. Though Wilson's findings are complex, he, like other researchers looking at local labor markets, concludes that inner-city black men are losing out in the competition with immigrants. But labor market competition doesn't tell the whole story. There are plenty of other arenas in which disadvantaged black Americans might


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compete with immigrants. Politics, for example, springs to mind. Certainly in Los Angeles, the competition between blacks and Latinos for public recognition and visibility is intense...More concretely, recent redistrictings have revealed struggles for dominance between the two groups...Again, in Los Angeles the classic case is Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital in Watts, built in response to the 1965 riots and now dominated by Latino immigrants.

Skerry's analysis posits tension between Latino and black America voters in Los Angeles, and it showed up in the vote on Proposition 187. However, in the immediate aftermath of passage of Proposition 187, several actions challenging its constitutionality were brought in state and federal courts. Latinos were widely represented in the plaintiff class, and United States District Court Judge Marianna Pfaelzer granted a motion for summary judgment in favor of plaintiffs. It effectively prevented enforcement of Proposition 187 by any state agency. League of United Latin American Citizens, et al v. Pete Wilson, et al, 1995 U.S. Lexis District 17720 (C.D. Ca. 1995). A preliminary injunction enjoining enforcement was left intact pending further order of the court. Essentially, the district court held that the subject matter of Proposition 187 was unconstitutional as being preempted by the federal government's exclusive constitutional authority over the regulation of immigration. Not only that, but any reasonably knowledgeable lawyer could have told voters that Proposition 187 could be held violative of the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982). In this case, Texas tried to do essentially what California voters were being asked to approve. The Supreme Court told Texas legislators they had acted in a manner violating the Constitution. However, for reasons all too familiar to civil rights activists, voters didn't listen; they simply wanted to punish immigrants, legal or otherwise. In 1992, the Immigration and Naturalization (INS) reports that about 1.278 million immigrants arrived in the United States. Some 810,000 individuals entered under the standard immigration categories which were revised by the Immigration Act of 1990. In addition, 163,000 individuals were legalized by amnesty or otherwise, under the Immigration and Control Act of 1986. Some 306,000 were estimated by the INS as having entered the United States illegally. It is well understood that immigration fuels population growth, but it is not widely understood that this growth does not count children born to immigrants in the United States. The children of immigrants born in the United States have been omitted from the count made by the Bureau of the Census since 1970. They are all citizens of this country no matter how their parents arrived here. Furthermore, the Census stopped asking about country of birth of parents in the 1980 census. Only California collects such data. In 1993, for example, foreign-born mothers gave birth to Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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261,670 of California's 584,480 babies. This data ignores nationality of the father, so it includes a child whose mother was an immigrant and whose father is native born, but omits children whose father was an immigrant and whose mother was native born. By extrapolation, about 766,000 babies born in the United States during 1993 alone would be the children of foreign-born mothers.This may be high for various reasons, but it is only an estimate of one year's increase in population. This reference to the Census numbers only reinforces the fact that America is a nation of immigrants and has been since the very beginning. The arrival in America of new immigrants and their assimilation has been a process that began at least four hundred and fifty years ago. The children of these new arrivals and their children ad infinitum may have prompted John Quincy Adams writing in 1819: "German immigrants must look forward to their posterity, rather than backward to their ancestors." In 1845, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his diary that "in this continent -asylum of all nations, the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles & Cossacks, & all the European tribes -- of the Africans, & of the Polynesians, will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting pot of the Dark Ages, or that which earlier emerged from the Pelagasic & Etruscan barbarism." The rights and wrongs of immigration have prompted litigation on a very large scale. As of January 25, 1996 the Supreme Court of the United States has issued rulings in some dozen cases between 1991 and 1996. They were found by a search of the Internet using "immigration" as the key word. Perhaps the best known of these cases is McNary v. Haitian Refugee Center, 498 U.S. 479 (1993). In this case, President Bush issued Executive Order No. 12807 (1992) directing the Coast Guard to intercept vessels illegally transporting passengers from Haiti to the United States and returning them to Haiti without first determining whether these passengers might qualify as refugees entitled to asylum in the United States. The question presented was whether such forced repatriation violated Section 243 (h)(1) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. Section 243 read: "The Attorney General shall not deport or return any alien....to a country if the Attorney General determines that such alien's life or freedom would be threatened in such country on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion." It was undisputed that the political coup in 1991 had triggered a continuing widely publicized reign of terror in Haiti, and that over 1,500 Haitians had been killed or subjected to violence and destruction of their property because of their political beliefs. Notwithstanding these undisputed facts, a majority of the court held that this law and Article 33.1 of the United Nations Convention


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Relating to the Status of Refugees had no extraterritorial effect, ie., on the high seas. Accordingly, the Coast Guard was allowed to continue returning Haitian refugees to a country where they would face political persecution or worse. Justice Blackmun dissented. His opinion suggests the majority was relying on empty statutory formalisms to justify returning Haitian refugees to Haiti. The last paragraph of Justice Blackmun's opinion reads: The refugees attempting to escape from Haiti do not claim a right of admission to this country. They do not even argue that the Government has no right to intercept their boats. They demand only that the United States, land of refugees and guardian of freedom, cease forcibly driving them back to detention, abuse, and death. That is a modest plea, vindicated by the Treaty and the statute. We should not close our ears to it. I dissent.

Had Bush been embarrassed by quite a few Haitian refugees landing in Florida just before the 1992 presidential election, he might have lost votes in that state. After this opinion, President Clinton, with some help from former President Carter, sent American troops to Haiti to stabilize the situation. Continuing violence made it impossible for the freely-elected President Aristide to be restored to office and to hold free elections. The approximately 37,000 Haitian refugees held by the United States at the Guantanamo Naval Base and elsewhere all returned to Haiti. All of this occurred in less than six months. After the election and Clinton's triumphant trip to Washington for his inauguration, the last person to leave Little Rock, Arkansas reminded his colleagues of a fact he didn't want forgotten. "It's the Economy, Stupid." The conventional wisdom assumes erroneously that the arrival of immigrants always leads to the loss of jobs. Immigrants will take jobs no one else wants. Quite a few people began thinking a look at the economy would be useful. One of them was Jeffrey Madrick, an Emmy Award-winning economics reporter for NBC from 1985 to 1993. In 1995, Random House published his book, The End of Affluence. Beginning in 1973, says Madrick, the American economy, though it continued to grow, grew far more slowly than it had on average since the Civil War ending in 1870. On page 5 of his book, Madrick has this to say. Between 1870 and 1973, and despite the many ups and downs in good and bad years, the U.S. economy grew at an average rate of 3.4 percent a year, excluding the effect of inflation -- he used Gross Domestic Product to show growth. But between 1973 and 1993 (the last year year for which we have complete data) the average rate of growth flattened to 2.3 percent a year after inflation, even though the workforce was expanding rapidly....the cyclical ups and downs of the economy are smoothed into straight lines....[and] the gap between the norm and the actual performance of the economy since 1973 widens.


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In the twenty years since 1973, the loss of income and production as measured by GDP had widened to $12 trillion by 1993. Had GDP grown at 3.4 percent a year -- its growth in 1995 was an anemic 2.1 percent -- tax revenues would have been roughly $2.4 trillion greater over twenty years than they actually were assuming a stable tax rate. Had the government retained all this income, the national debt of $4 trillion could have been cut in half. However, according to Madrick, productivity did not propel the economy of the United States. In the immediate post-World War II period, the rate of productivity growth rose to 2.7 percent a year. In 1973, the average annual productivity growth fell to 0.9 percent a year, and this decline over the years to 1995, produced stagnating incomes for the middle class and the working poor. In 1973, this country had its first oil shock, but it was followed by another in 1981. The price of crude oil peaked at $36 per barrel, while it declined to about half of this price by 1989. It declined partly because America saw the decreased availability of oil as an incentive to develop more fuel efficiency. The Big Three automakers in Detroit dragged their heels while imports from Japan and Europe began capturing market share from Detroit. The Big Three were used to and comfortable with mass production. Labor was reluctant to accept lower wages, because it did not see the shortage of energy as anything to worry about in the long term. So when demand for labor picked up sharply, labor was not long in bargaining for higher wages after 1981, At this point, however, Reagan introduced a note of uncertainty into the political dialogue. He would cut taxes and test his supply-side theory of economics. With uncertainty, a great deal of economic activity was shifted to the future. And when the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 was enacted by Congress, the new lower tax rates did not become fully effective until 1984. Furthermore, Congress fussed around with the 1981 measure and then enacted the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act in late 1982. Thus, fiscal policy contributed to the economy's below-capacity output between the 1979 and 1981-82 recessions and worsened the severity of the latter. On page 16 of his book, Madrick adds this note: "Overall, discounted for inflation, the average weekly wages of so-called nonsupervisory workers, about 80 percent of the workforce, fell by 15 percent from 1973 to 1993....By about 1987, slow economic growth had begun to put pressure on the salaries of better paid white collar workers as well...As a result of these factors, the average real income of families was only a few percentage points higher in 1993 than in 1973, and that largely because so many more spouses were working." The net result of these factors was that, as incomes stopped growing, people saved less and borrowed more. And, as tax revenues declined or grew more slowly, government borrowed more to meet the heavy demands Reagan made to support huge defense expenditures.The government deficit exploded and never really stopped.


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The need for capital in the United States after 1992 drove interest rates to higher levels to attract foreign capital. The inflow of this capital showed up statistically as a very large trade deficit in the United States. The foreign demand for investment assets in the United States raised the international demand for dollars. The foreign demand for investment assets in the United States increased the dollar's value to unprecedented levels. On a relatively small scale, publishers in Europe acquired Doubleday Publishing Co. Harper & Row, later converting its corporate name to HarperCollins, was acquired by a United Kingdom publisher. Japanese companies acquired entertainment conglomerates in Los Angeles, Rockefeller Center in New York City, and other American assets. As economic growth slowed in the United States, employers began reducing their workforces in the 1980s, instead of making capital expenditures to lower costs and remain competitive. In the thirteen months ending in January, 1996 layoffs nationally reached about 602,000 employees. Worst hit were the employees of telecommunications and computer companies; they announced cuts of 42,400 and 12,000 jobs respectively. American business actually reduced capital investment by significant amounts in the face of rising foreign competition and declining returns. The result was fewer jobs and lower wages which slowed economic growth even more by reducing the demand for goods. The only exception to this litany of business shortsightedness was the technology sector. International Business Machines, Microsoft, Intel and the entire sector reported increasing earnings and even market penetration in some cases. America OnLine is an important presence in the world of communications with over five million subscribers. In mid-March, 1996 America Online agreed with Microsoft Corporation to join forces and expand the market for Internet access. A.T. & T. is expected to use its phone lines to handle the rapidly growing number of AOL subscribers seeking Internet access. By the end of 1996, AOL is expected to more than double its subscribers. The recent passage of a new telecom bill by Congress will probably cause a healthy competition among the various television, cable, and telephone companies, such as American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) and the Baby Bells, TCI, Viacom and other cable television, and the four television networks. There has also been a scramble to get on line with the Internet. In early 1996, a dispute erupted; how many subscribers used Internet? Regardless of who is right, most of those who did surveys agree it has over 12 million subscribers. Technology keeps getting better with very high speed modems, ISDN, ATM and fiber optic lines. No industry can remain neutral; it must remain competitive. Printing of books has improved with computer-to-plate (CTP) printing. This technology promises great gains in productivity, lower costs from reduced human labor and materials, and more flexibility


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in the size of a first printing. Eastman Kodak announced an infrared thermal printing plate in early 1996. It will print any number of copies from a few hundred to a million. Resolution of type remains at 2500 dots per inch. Flexibility has been at the core of production technology. Through new electronics including robots, and the adoption of commonsense innovations on the plant floor, economies of scale became less important. So-called flexible production could now allow companies to operate more efficiently. They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era is a new book by E.J Dionne Jr. In this carefully organized book, Dionne compared the likely developments of the next decade to the economic opportunitiess between 1870 and 1900 which led to the first Progressive Era, then Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. They understood what voters wanted. George Bush, he wrote, made the fatal mistake of underestimating the level of economic anxiety during the 1992 presidential campaign. Clinton may have made the same miscalculation in 1994. The pre-Labor Day speech of Labor Secretary Robert Reich eerily predicted the revolt of the Anxious Class. "In an astonishingly short time, he said, "the old middle class has splintered. The erosion of a sense of shared prospects poses what might be our nation's most critical challenge of the post-Cold War era." Thus, voters in 1994 -- nationally only 39 percent bothered to vote -- were as worried at least as much by falling incomes and lost benefits as they were about not working at all. The period between November, 1994 and November, 1996 may show that Clinton has learned this lesson and will address it in ways the anxious class or middle will understand. Howver, Clinton has other problems. At the end of World War II, Western Europe was economically exhausted and suffered from shattered morale and war damage. The Soviet Union, however, had emerged from the war with its armed forces intact and dominating Eastern European nations like Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and a divided Germany. The Brussels Treaty with only the United Kingdom, France, amd the Low Countries was simply not enough to prevent a Russian attack through Germany. In 1948, these countries negotiated with the United States and other countries to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Created in 1949, NATO's member states united in collective self-defense. Its members included the United States, Canada, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Greece, Iceland, Italy, West Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portigal, Spain, and Turkey.


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In the early days of 1996, the Republican candidates for president monopolized the news. The press may have overlooked an event featuring a widely known musician. Jazz legend Dave Brubeck was born in 1920 and during his lifetime he was equally distinguished as a composer and pianist. He began his musical career with the Dave Brubeck Octet in 1949. Later in 1958 the combination of Brubeck with drummer Joe Morello, double bassist Eugene Wright and alto saxophonist Paul Desmond quickly achieved and overwhelming popular success as the Dave Brubeck Quartet. This group performed continuously through 1967. In the last thirty years, Brubeck performed at the White House in 1964 and 1981 and at the Moscow summit in 1988 honoring Mikhail Gorbachev. On January 4, 1996 Dave Brubeck was awarded the National Academy of recording Arts & Sciences Lifetime Acheivment Award. This award honors individuals who during their lifetimes have made creative contributions of outstanding artistic significance in the field of recording. Brubeck received this award at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles on February 27, 1996 the day after the New Hampshire presidential primary. Other primaries led to the inevitable. Bob Dole was the presumptive winner of the nomination, even before the Republican convention in August. On June 12, 1996 he resigned from the Senate that he had served well for so many years. As a campaigner matched against Bill Clinton, his lack of vision and the baggage of the Christian Coalition and other neoconservatives became too heavy. Kemp, his vice-presidential nominee, did little to help Dole who was behind in the polls from the outset. His standing did not improve with the passage of time, and his performance in both debates was lackluster. His managers were desperate, as this editorial art by Jeff Danziger suggests.


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During this presidential year of 1996, Bill Clinton had no opposition and Senator Bob Dole was the presumptive nominee of his party by the end of March. Except for the party nominating conventions, very little political action was considered likely to make headlines for at least four months. Dole has had to reduce spending until he qualifies in August for federal money, and Clinton has not had to spend much money in his campaign. In the March 11 issue of The New Yorker, Michael Kelly's article got it right on those issues on which most voters seem attracted. These voters -- those who listened to Republican candidates during the primaries -- think that a flat tax, or some radical simplification of the tax system makes sense. They want illegal immigration stopped. They believe that the new world order, or what the labor analyst Richard Rothstein calls the 'global hiring hall,' is indeed making transnational corporations and Wall Street capitalists rich at the expense of American workers. They think that the moneyed interests have corrupted politics. They are dubious about the increased use of American soldiers as international peacekeepers. They believe that the United States should get tougher with Japan, China, and other trade competitors. They regard affirmative action as reverse discrimination. They believe that the media, Hollywood, and academe are hostile to their values. They are distressed by gay marriages, strongly oppose out-of-wedlock births, and would like to see at least some limits on abortion. They believe these positions are legitimate, regardless of whether they violate party orthodoxies or the mainstream media's sense of propriety. They are angry that their views have been ignored or derided.""


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By 1996, the presidential campaign of that year has been underway ever since the 1993 struggle for health care ended in a failure of the entire legislative process. The System by David Broder and Haynes Johnson documents the mistakes of both sides of this monumental battle. Elections in Congressional and state legislative districts were also scheduled in 1996. These Congressional elections had to occur in districts apportioned after the 1990 Census with boundaries fixed by a case decided thirty-four years ago. Just one case decided by the Supreme Court has changed the political geography of the United States. Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962). It arose in Tennessee. Its state constitution required the state legislature to apportion its members among the state's ninety-five counties after each decennial census. This apportionment had not occurred since 1901, so the urban plaintiffs asked the federal court to declare the state apportionment scheme was unconstitutional. With the growth in population since 1901, urban voters were disfavored and denied representation equal to the suburban and rural voters. The Supreme Court agreed in a 6-2 vote and an opinion of 163 pages. Gray v Sanders, 372 U.S. 368 (1963) first announced the "one man, one vote" rule, and Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964) confirmed this rule with respect to Congressional and state legislative districts. Since 1964, this issue has arisen many times in efforts to apportion districts in which black Americans have a better shot at being elected to Congress or the state legislatures than they have had within the institutionalized racism of the South. The presidential campaign for the Republicans began in 1995, really 1993 if one considers the struggle over health care that began in that year. President Clinton began planning his 1996 campaign after the setback of the Democrats in the Congressional elections in 1994. He spent a great deal of time in the key electoral vote states, such as California. Voters gave Republicans control of both the House and Senate for the first time in forty years. By mid-1995, Republicans had fielded eight candidates for president. Steven Forbes was a late entry, but he spent his own money to catch up to the apparent front runners, Senator Bob Dole (Rep. Kansas), former Governor of Tennessee, Lamar Alexander, aggressive television columnist, Patrick Buchanan, Senator Phil Gramm (Rep. Texas), Senator Richard Lugar (Rep. Ind.) and a small handful of side shows in the race for the identity it gave them. The time and place of primary elections is fixed by state law, and the Constitution determines the time, place, and manner of general elections. The Constitution, Article I, Section 4 provides that "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislatures thereof, but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators." Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution provides in


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part: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress:..." These Electors represent the Electoral College, and it is their vote that actually determines who is elected president and vice president. In case one candidate receives less than a majority of electoral votes, the House of Representatives determines the final outcome, with each state having one vote. The Senate elects the vice president with the same limitation on number of votes. The general election is held on the same date throughout the United States; in 1996 it will be on November 5. Electors meet in December of each presidential election year to cast their votes for president and vice president of the United States. State laws determine whether each elector was pledged to vote for the candidate of his choice, and a few states have a winner-take-all primary. Electors may change their minds and vote for another candidate unless state law prohibits it. Thus, in primary or caucus states, voters in effect elect a slate of delegates pledged to a particular candidate. These delegates meet at the party conventions to nominate a candidate for president and vice president. The early primaries or caucus states included Louisiana, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Delaware. President Clinton had no opposition, so the delegates elected from the states and listed here were pledged only to a Republican candidate. On February 27, Arizona, North Dakota, and South Dakota voters went to the polls. On March 5, 1996 Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington voted for a total of 277 convention delegates. By the end of March,1996 some 1500 delegates were elected, and Senator Dole announced he would be the Republican candidate nominated by the party convention in August. It will require 996 convention delegate votes to nominate Republican candidates for president and vice president. Clinton and Gore will be nominated by the Democratic Party convention in Chicago. The Republican Party convention will be in San Diego. Buchanan surprised everyone by running ahead of Gramm in Louisiana with a minuscule voter turnout. Buchanan came in second in Iowa behind Dole, Alexander finished third, Forbes finished fourth, and Gramm finished a poor fifth. He withdrew the next day, while the other Republicans wasted no time in getting to New Hampshire. The election left some interesting numbers behind. These numbers illustrated that elections cost money and lots of it. An enterprising reporter at the New York Times collected statistics on the amount per vote that each candidate paid out in Iowa. An estimate only, the results only reinforced the public perception that votes cost


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money. Forbes, for example, paid $407.40 for each of 9,816 votes in the Iowa caucus. Dole paid $34.46 for each of 25,378 votes, and Buchanan paid an estimated $26.65 for each of 22,512 votes. Only about 86,000 Iowa voters showed up at the caucus meetings. Iowa has twenty-five delegates at the Republican Convention in August, 1996, and it has six electoral votes. Its voting age population was about 2.05 million people in 1994. New Hampshire had only 832,000 people of voting age in 1994, and Republicans paid more per candidate than in Iowa for the election on February 20, 1996. Almost unnoticed in the shift from Iowa to New Hampshire was an issue that resonates with just about all voters. Job security and wage stagnation. Since 1979, some 43 million workers lost their jobs. From that year, there had been a net gain in jobs by the end of 1995. Many of the jobs lost came from the normal attrition, business failures, or plant relocation. Far more jobs have been created than lost over that period -- about 58 million. Increasingly, the jobs that have been disappearing were those of whitecollar workers, many at large corporations, and women as well as men at the peak of their careers. These people all get severance pay, usually calculated at one week's base pay for each year of service within the company. About one third of all those laid off are left without medical coverage, and two-thirds are left without life insurance. Typically, only executives got outplacement assistance. Corporations downsize, because technology makes some jobs obsolete. The company is determined to show its stockholders a better balance sheet, i.e., it wants to be more profitable. In mergers, certain employees have become redundant. When, for example, two banks merge, the lead bank doesn't need all the other bank's branch offices or their employees. Less than a third of all workers laid off are fortunate enough to find new jobs with pay equal to or better than before. Compounding this frustration are stagnant wages and an increasingly unequal distribution of both income and wealth. Adjusted for inflation, the median wage for the period between 1991 and 1995 was nearly 3 percent below what it was in 1979. Average household income climbed 10 percent between 1979 and 1994, but 97 percent of the gain went to the richest 10 percent of the population. Corporate downsizing is not the only reason for laying off workers; jobs have been exported to low wage areas. On an almost weekly basis, the print media report another industry plagued by the export of jobs. In the apparel industry, for example, employment took a sudden plunge in 1995. After four years of relative stability, some 100,000 jobs just vanished. An additional 42,000 jobs vanished in the fabrics industry which produces the raw material for clothing. These two industries accounted for a shrinkage of 142,000 jobs, some 40 percent of all manufacturing jobs lost in the United States in


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1995. A combination of technology and export of jobs to Mexico has simply cost these textile, clothing and materials employees their jobs. Jobs in other industries are also vanishing. In early 1996, for example, A T & T announced it would lay off 40,000 employees, many of them in supervisorial jobs. Technology is more efficient than redundant humans. Thus, it's surprising that Senator Dole didn't see this issue developing. After losing to Buchanan in New Hampshire, he said, "We didn't plan it this way. I didn't realize that jobs and trade and what makes America work would become a big issue in the last few days of this campaign." By "trade," Dole was referring to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which he supported in 1993. The Dole campaign staff could easily have advised him of this issue. As of November 13, 1995 there was a Buchanan for President page on the Internet. Aside from the purely nativist language to keep the immigrants at bay, it stated: "Rather than making 'global free trade' a golden calf which we all bow down to and worship, all trade deals should be judged by whether: (a) they maintain U.S. sovereignty, (b) they protect vital economic interests, and (c) they ensure a rising standard of living for all our workers. We must stop sacrificing American jobs on the altars of transnational corporations whose sole loyalty is to the bottomline." Perhaps Dole was too busy with other problems in Congress, such as a balanced budget. For at the period from October, 1995 to February, 1996 Republicans have harped on a balanced budget. However, Democrats were quick to identify those who would be hurt the most; they included advocates of the poor whose meager incomes would be further reduced, people needing Medicaid and Medicare, and even beneficiaries of Social Security. Twice, the Republicans shut the government down, because Clinton refused to sign any measure but a clean bill raising the debt limit without any Republican program included. The bloom was off the deficit rose, at least during primary season. Curiously, some of Buchanan's applause lines from his stock speech were leveled at corporations. He called top management "corporate executioners" who "worship at the altar of efficiency." Buchanan was, of course, addressing corporate downsizing with a charge against earnings as the only cost to business for laying off thousands of employees. They are left on the street with nothing but the severance pay and unemployment compensation benefits. These don't last very long. If a laid-off employee does find another job, it almost invariably pays less than the job he or she once had. In fact, corporations enjoy tax benefits that individuals might go to jail for claiming. Either that or a huge jeopardy assessment from the Internal Revenue Service plus interest.


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The income received from tax revenue of all kinds equalled $1.18 trillion for 1994. Only 11.9 percent of this revenue was paid by corporations. Individual income taxes accounted for 45.9 percent, individual employment taxes accounted for an estimated 19.4 percent of the total, and the rest of the revenue from taxes came from excise and estate taxes, a total of 4.8 percent. Thus, individuals paid about 4.15 times as much in income taxes as corporations in 1994, even though the maximun rate for both is almost the same -- 35 percent for corporations and 39.6 percent for individuals in the highest bracket. Corporations pay 35 percent on taxable income of $15,000,000 or $5,250,000 and 35 percent on the excess over $15,000,000. Corporations, however, profit from deductions not available to individuals, unless the individuals are engaged in a trade or business. Corporations may use the net operating loss carryover and capital loss carryback provisions of the code. But when a corporation abandons an illconceived project after pumping millions into it, about a third of the amount lost is taken as a deduction of the corporation. And if an oil tanker runs aground and pollutes the water and shoreline wildlife, the cost of environmental cleanup is a major deduction claimed by the company that made the mess in the first place. Exxon has taken a $1.7 billion after-tax charge against income for the environmental havoc the Exxon Valdez caused in Alaska. Were a huge amount awarded as punitive damages, the amount would not be deductible. In the case of securities fraud, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) might negotiate for an amount too low to compensate those defrauded as a settlement of civil liability. Still, the company gets a deduction of the amount for its own fraud. In February, 1996 a federal judge in Chicago approved the $409 million settlement of a class action against drug manufacturers. They had been charged with conspiracy to fix prices on sales to independent pharmacies. This amount, if approved, will be a deduction against income of the corporate defendants. The independent pharmacies will each be paid about $5,000 after deduction of their costs, while the defendants will each share in the benefits of the charge against income of the total amount of $409 million. Individuals don't begin to have tax benefits like this. Individuals pay 39.6 percent on taxable income over $250,000 ($79,639 plus 39.6 percent on amount of excess of $250,000 -- slightly more in 1995 for those in the highest income bracket). These figures show only federal income taxes. Many states have both corporate and individual income taxes. These state taxes are usually deductible on the federal tax return. So are the standard deductions like mortgage interest, medical payments if in excess of a percentage of income, and charitable deductions. An individual found liable in a civil action had better be insured against negligence or nuisance liability, because a judgment


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against him is not deductible. Some people have examined ways of simplifying and/or reducing taxes by eliminating all deductions. During late 1995 and early 1996, a so-called flat tax concept surfaced. Steven Forbes pushed this concept in his campaign for the presidency. Dick Armey (Rep. Texas) has his own version of the flat tax with some irrelevant differences from those in Forbes' plan. Former Congressman Frank Kemp chaired a commission that endorsed the flat tax. It's only virtue is its simplicity. Armey's proposal claims the tax return will be the size of a postcard for just about everyone. This superficial claim belies the real purpose of the flat tax. It will enrich the already wealthy, and at a single 17 percent across-the-boards rate, the flat tax will reduce federal revenue. Nobody knows by how much the flat tax will reduce revenue from taxes, but balancing the budget would become virtually impossible. Voters have become increasingly distrustful about promises from people like Forbes. He campaigned in Iowa and New Hampshire on one issue, the flat tax. His one-dimensional view of issues on the minds of most voters caused him to finish fourth in Iowa and New Hampshire. By February 20, 1996, no one campaigning in New Hampshire, except for Buchanan had aggressively addressed the economic difficulties that had steadily eroded the quality of life for an increasing number of working men and women. Workers who were "downsized" out of a job and unemployed as a result still vote, and they were really worried. Oddly, Patrick Buchanan, a Republican of absolutes, touched on this voter Angst by condemning corporate greed. Buchanan also won the New Hampshire primary. But he was so preoccupied with peddling his hatred of immigrants, free trade, and the need for prayer in the schools that he overlooked a golden opprotunity. Senator Edward Kennedy (Dem. Mass.) seized the same opportunity but to a vastly smaller audience, the Congressional Record. On February 8, 1996 his address to the Center for National Policy was printed in the Congressional Record at page s1187 and retrieved via Internet. "Americans are working more and earning less," he said. "Their standard of living is stagnant or sinking. They worry about losing their jobs, losing the health insurance, affording their children's education, caring for their parents in old age, and somehow still saving enough for some semblance of security in their own retirement." Senator Kennedy zeroed in on the hypocrisy of so many Republicans. "It makes no sense, to preach hope, growth, and opportunity while touting policies that bring growth only to the richest, deny hope to the poorest, and restrict opportunity for the vast majority." Messages like this tend to get lost in the presidential campaign clutter and the increasing stridency of radio and television talk shows. In 1996,


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Times Books, an imprint of Random House published Howard Kurtz's book on talk shows, Hot Air: All Talk, All the Time. In this book, Kurtz looks at a nation awash in radio and television talk shows and concludes it may be drowning. He goes a long way toward explaining why political discourse has been cheapened by the meanness of its ratings-conscious talk show hosts or deejays. Kurtz seems ambivalent about the talk show genre. While he was himself was a talk show host in Washington for sixteen months, Kurtz is still a guest on the circuit. "Clearly, the talk phenomenon helps viewers and listeners feel connected to a political world remote from their daily existence," he wrote. On the other hand, he states that talk shows are often mindless and repetitive, merely a vehicle for their insincere or strident hosts. The opening paragraph in chapter one set the tone for the rest of the book. America is awash in talk. Loud talk. Angry talk. Conspiratorial talk. Raunchy talk, smug talk, self-serving talk, funny talk, rumormongering talk. A cacophony of chat fills the airwaves from coast to coast, from dawn to dusk and beyond, all talk all the time. The richest and most prominent talkers include a wide assortment of pundits, commentators, experts, hacks, and hucksters, some of them cloaked in the thinnest journalistic garb. They analyze, interpret, elucidate, expound, pontificate, and predict, an unprecedented barrage of blather and bluster that has dramatically ratcheted up the noise level of political debate.

Kurtz describes all this with a benign view that obscures its growing political influence. "Let's face it:" he wrote, "talk is cheap. The armchair warriors defuse world crises, wipe out budget deficits, and solve the welfare mess, all before the commercial break: And it's all make-believe. They don't have to build coalitions or crunch numbers or live with the consequences of their errors. If they screw up, there's always next week's show to test-drive new theories."


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In 1996, three people, whose previous experience was little more than popping off on television talk shows became candidates for president. They included Buchanan, a regular panelist, presumably as a journalist, Alan Keyes, a Baltimore radio talk show host, and Robert Dornan, a Congressman widely known in Southern California and a regular substitute for Rush Limbaugh. Not one of the talk show high priests has any real knowledge of the subjects they so glibly discussed. These include Larry King, John McLaughlin, Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus, Oprah Winfrey, and Ted Koppel. With these hosts, serious issues that matter to the entire country seldom get discussed. Too many viewers would surf the channels to find more titillating fare. And the weekend television shows are full of pseudo-journalists who make their real income by speaking engagements for fees of $5,000 and up. They do not really defend this practice that has a basic conflict, but not one of them will even discuss the amount they earn in fees. Robert Novak is a regular columnist with views that tilt to the right, while Michael Kinsley seems to be the token liberal for balance. All these shows and their panelists have a common denominator; they're entertainment, and any similarity to news is coincidental, accidental, or both. The public that listens to or views these talk shows seems to have forgotten that his or her anger prompted the call in to join the "talk." So,


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having psychologically joined the show that peddles the same ideas that prompted the call in the first place, he or she seldom if ever disagrees to the point of corroborating what the host had presented as fact. In fact, what people like Limbaugh say is heard by people without any critical faculty. In the same speech by Senator Kennedy of February 6, 1996 the Senator said: From World War II until 1973, national economic growth benefited the vast majority of Americans. We were all growing together; but now we're growing apart -- and the result is a tip-ofthe-iceberg economy. Since 1973, the lower 60 percent of American wage-earners -- three fifths of our entire workforce -have actually lost ground. Real family income has fallen for 60 percent of all Americans, even as the income of the wealthiest 5 percent increased by nearly a third, and income for the top 1 percent almost doubled. As we approach the 21st Century, we confront an economically unjustified, socially dangerous, historically unprecedented, and morally unacceptable income gap between the wealthy and the rest of our people.

No thought or fact from Kennedy's speech had a chance of being discussed on a radio or television talk show even by way of ridicule. Perhaps Congress might consider a V-chip for television talk shows of the variety described by Howard Kurtz.Those watching these programs seem to have a child-like faith in the nostrums of the past peddled by the Republican medicinemen. Nor is there any possibility that CNN and the other networks might offer serious programming. Ratings make money, not content. And environmental subjects are not likely to receive any rational attention from the talk show hosts. The so-called Wise Use Movement has taken care of the counterenvironmental culture. It has organized those irritated by any environmental regulation, eg., western ranchers who want free use of federally-owned land. Aside from the very wealthy executives of the extractive sector who secretly fund the Wise Use movement, its staff gathered a few right wing talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh into a relatively small group of off-the-road motorcyclists and others who want to end the environmental movement. Ron Arnold is the executive of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, and Alan Gottlieb, a conservative fundraiser from Bellevue, Washington, raises money for the Wise Use Movement. This movement has an appealing populist message for the small landowner who is told over and over by itinerant organizers that the federal government is out to steal his land and that environmentalists are conspiring in the theft. Ideological and rhetorical support for the Wise Use backlash has been provided to the media by people like reactionary populist Rush Limbaugh and conservative columnist George Will. Both these men spend less time defending the tenets of Wise Use ideology than they do trashing environmentalism.


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Limbaugh rails daily about "enviro-religious fanatics and eco-Nazis" on some 600 radio stations nationwide. In the 1980s, encouraged by President Reagan, the Wise Use people began developing a theory that environmental regulations to the extent they reduced the value of private property represented a Fifth Amendment "taking" of property without just compensation. In 1987, the Supreme Court held that the California Coastal Commission could not require that a property owner give up a portion of his beachfront property for public access in return for a building permit. Nollan v. California Coastal Commission, 483 U.S. 825 (1987). In another case, the same court held that Lucas' private property had lost value (much of it underwater for most of the year) when he was denied a building permit for reasons of public safety. Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, 505 U.S. 1003 (1992). However, for reasons appearing later, the Supreme Court may have reached the end of the line in so-called takings cases. Dolan v. City of Tigard, Oregon, 114 S. Ct. 2309 (1994). In this case, Florence Dolan owned and operated a plumbing supply store in the City of Tigard, Oregon. She applied for a permit to expand the business. City Planning officials agreed to a building permit, but they wanted Mrs. Dolan to convey a portion of her property for flood control and a bicycle path. A condition like this was well within the discretionary power of city planners under state law.She sued the city alleging the condition was a Fifth Amendment "taking" of her property without any compensation.In a 5-4 decision, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote for the slim majority. In doing so, however, he overruled two lower courts, the Oregon Court of Appeals (832 P.2nd 853) and the Supreme Court of Oregon (854 P.2nd 437). In the dissent, Justice Stevens, joined by Justices Blackmun and Ginsberg, wrote: "Candidly acknowledging the lack of federal authority for its exercise in rulemaking, the Court purports to find guidance in 12 'representative' state court decisions. To do so is certainly appropriate. The state cases the Court consults, however, either fail to support or decidedly undermine the Court's conclusions in key respects. First, although discussion of the state cases p ermeates the Court's analysis of the appropriate test to apply in this case, the test on which the Court settles is not naturally derived from those courts' decisions....Not one of the state cases cited by the Court announces anything akin to a 'rough proportionality' requirement..."

The dissent had other comments. "Even if Dolan should accept the city's conditions in exchange for the benefit that she seeks, it would not necessarily follow that she had been denied 'just compensation' since it would be appropriate to consider the receipt of that benefit in any calculation of 'just compensation.' ....But even if that discretionary benefit were so trifling that it could not be just


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compensation when it has 'little or no relationship' to the property, the Court fails to explain why the same value would suffice when the required nexus is present. In this respect, the Court's reliance on the 'unconstitutional conditions' doctrine is assuredly novel and arguably incoherent."

The court decided for the first time that the city had the burden of establishing the constitutionality of its conditions by making an individualized determination that the condition in question satisfied the proportionality requirement. "If the government can demonstrate that the conditions it has imposed in a land-use permit are rational, impartial and conducive to fulfilling the aims of a valid land-use plan, a strong presumptiom of validity should attach to those conditions. The burden of demonstrating that those conditions have unreasonably impaired the economic value of the proposed improvement belongs squarely on the shoulders of the party challenging the state action's constitutionality. That allocation of burdens has served us well in the past. The Court has stumbled badly today by reversing it.".

For decades, corporate America has violated a code of conduct created by Congress by enacting laws to establish the public policy of the United States. The Sherman Act, for example created antitrust laws in 1890. The two securities laws enacted in 1934 established full disclosure of company accounting before their securities were sold to the public. Failure to disclose a material fact served as the basis for an indictment leading to a criminal trial. There are countless examples of Congressional policy making. The Internal Revenue Code was one example. In 1954, for example, Congress enacted Section 162. Generally, Section 162 dealt with the deductions by a corporation of ordinary and necessary business expenses. Subsection (f) of Section 162 stated: "No deduction shall be allowed under subsection (a) for any fine or similar or similar penalty paid to a government for the violation of any law." The Supreme Court has addressed the issue of deductibility of legal fees following an unsuccessful defense of criminal offenses. Commissioner of Internal Revenue v. Tellier, 383 U.S. 687 (1966). The question here was stated by Justice Stewart: "[May] expenses incurred by a taxpayer in the unsuccessful defense of a criminal prosecution qualify under Section 162 (a) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 which allows a deduction of "all the ordinary and necessary expenses paid or incurred during the taxable year in carrying on any trade or business?" The Commisioner of Internal Revenue and the Tax Court determined that even though the expenditures met the literal test of Section 162, their deduction should nonetheless be disallowed on the grounds of public policy. Justice Stewart disposed of this position of the Commissioner. "It finds no support in any regulation or statute or in any decision of this Court, and Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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we believe no such 'public policy' exception to the plain provision of Section 162 (a) is warranted in the circumstances presented by this case." However, in Hoover Motor Express, Co. v. United States, 356 U.S. 38 (1953) the Supreme Court upheld the disallowance of deductions claimed by taxpayer for fines and penalties imposed on them for violating state penal statutes. See also Commissioner of Internal Revenue v. Heininger, 320 U.S. 467 (1943). Allowing a deduction would "frustrate sharply defined national or state policies proscribing particular types of conduct." In Heininger, the deduction was disallowed. And in Commissioner of Internal Revenue v. Sullivan, 356 U.S. 27 (1954), the Supreme Court allowed the deduction for rent and wages paid by the operators of a gambling enterprise, even though both the business itself and the specific rent and wage payments there were illegal under state law. Despite the language of Section 162, corporate America continues to violate environmental laws. Presumably, corporate America continues to deduct the costs of unsuccessfully defending civil cases. In these cases, injunctive relief is often the only remedy for a violation of some environmental law. And where an agency of the United States is the defendant, the corporation licensed or otherwise permitted to act unlawfully by the agency should be required to deposit a sum in court for damages to the environment as, for example, the costs of cleanup. There is nothing particularly new in this approach. It merely announces the rule that the polluter shall pay. By itself, Section 162 (f) is not enough. An example of what might work in controlling the excesses of corporate America occurred on February 27, 1996, even though only uncontrolled logging without laws was involved. A complaint was filed to enjoin uncontrolled logging, The Klamath Tribe v. United States, United States Forest Service, Dan Glickman, Secretary of Agriculture, and Robert Williams, Acting Regional Forester, United States Forest Service, Region 6. It was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Oregon.While this case needs a few preliminary comments, it involves enforcement of Indian tribal rights held by them by treaty with the United States. In July, 1995 President Clinton signed a bill speeding up salvage sales of timber by exempting them from environmental assessments and limiting citizens' ability to challenge the sales in court. The bill was attached as a rider to the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations and Rescissions Act of 1995. Clinton has now said he would support a measure, the Salvage Repeal Bill, introduced in Congress on December 7, 1995. H.R. 2745 is more fully described as the Restoration of Natural Resources Laws on the Public Lands Act of 1995. Section 2 (a) of the bill was the one-line statement "Section 2001 of Public Law 104-19 (109 Stat. 240) is repealed."


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The nationwide mobilization to repeal the Salvage rider appeared on the Internet on February 27, 1996, and it was designated as National CallIn Day. In addition to listing fax and phone numbers of members of Congress, the Internet page featured statements of prominent scientists and others opposing the Salvage Bill. In one of these statements, the Congressional Budget Office estimated these proposals (salvage timber sale programs) "only look at the income from these sales. They do not consider any costs. The expenses of road building, planning and administering sales, etc. must, of course, eventually be paid, either from other Forest Service funds or by supplementary appropriations thereby contributing to further increases in the federal deficit." The Wilderness Society signed this contribution. However, Robert Wolf, former budget analyst at the Congressional Research Service, described the actual cost to taxpayers involved "losses of between $431 million to $1.6 billion for Senator Gorton's salvage rider." Contributors to the Internet page seem to have mobilized other resources. A letter from the Oregon Outdoors Association, the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association, and the Pacific Coast Federation of Fisherman's Associations asked President Clinton to "fight for total repeal" of the timber clear-cut rider. The campaign to repeal the rider was well organized and professional in all its aspects, including comments from Ralph Nader's Taxpayer Assets Program (TAP). While failure to repeal the rider would have disastrous environmental consequences, these were dealt with after the economic consequences. But an article in the Washington Post on February 27, 1996 was quite specific. In his front page story, Tom Kenworthy wrote that "the Forest Service and timber industry are cutting stands of green, healthy trees under the guise of salvage." Additionally, a group of over 250 forestry leaders around the country, has asked the leadership of the Seventh American Forest Congress to speak out for the repeal of the "logging without laws" forest clear-cut rider. We see fish on the brink of extinction," they wrote, "wholesale destruction of wildlife habitat, rivers swollen with silt, native forests being clear-cut, and the ecological integrity of aquatic and forest ecosystems unraveling. The rider mocks the central tenet that our nation possesses both the knowledge and the desire to produce wood fiber within the constraints of laws to protect all our forests. The effect of the Clear-cut Rider in suspending the laws and denying citizen access to the courts to enforce them is fundamentally at odds that the future of our forests will be determined in an open and participatory process." The Clear-cut Rider exempted sales of timber from the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, and other environmental laws for two years. The Audubon Society has described this law "as the worst ever environmental legislation."


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Some background on litigation that seeks to enjoin uncontrolled logging seems relevant. In 1864, the Klamath Tribes entered into a treaty with the United States, ceding title to over twenty million acres of their ancestral homeland extending from central Oregon through northern California, from the Cascades crest to the edge of the Great Basin. This treaty was ratified by the Senate of the United States on July 2, 1864. In this treaty, the Klamath Tribe was promised the exclusive use and possession of the lands ceded for the purpose of hunting, fishing and gathering roots, seeds, and berries on this land as food at a subsistence level. In 1954, Congress enacted the Klamath Termination Act, ending the Tribes' federally protected status. In 1986, Congress enacted the Klamath Restoration Act, restoring federal recognition to the Klamath Tribes and the government-to-government relationship between the tribe of native American Indians and the United States. The Termination Act expressly reserved the Klamath Tribes' right to hunt, fish and gather on their reservation. The ability of the Klamath Tribes to exercise their treaty rights for subsistence depends solely on the availability of resources within the reservation. However, the continuing availability of these resources has been tragically diminished by the poor management of the Forest Service. By allowing uncontrolled logging, the Forest Service has accelerated the decline in resources essential to the Klamath Tribes. Previously abundant game, fish, and bird species that have played a central role in the Tribes' subsistence are listed or candidates for listing in the list maintained in accordance with the requirements of the Endangered Species Act. By its actions of several decades, the Forest Service, an agency of the United States, has almost completely eroded the resource base for the exercise by the Tribes of their treaty rights. The United States has an ongoing obligation to protect and defend tribal treaty rights, an obligation shown to have been denied by the Forest Service in allowing uncontrolled logging. Seminole Nation v. United States, 316 U.S. 286 (1942). This case was not mentioned in the Internet campaign to repeal the Salvage Bill. This atrocious abuse of the Congressional power to legislate by attaching riders to substantive measures should be repealed. Clinton promised he would try, but his effort got mixed up with budget negotiations. Except for the video, sound, and pictures, this campaign is clearly a forerunner for political campaigns of the 21st century. All the technology for using these approaches is now in existence in 1996. Negative ads may well be as dead as the mythical dodo bird. An Abridged History of the United States went to press and uploading before the election on November 5, 1996. However, the issues debated and whether Bob Dole or Bill Clinton is elected will all be played out during the months beginning in April, 1996.


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Job security and wage stagnation are almost certain to lead all other issues debated. The economy of the 1990s could no longer support the economic growth of 3.5 percent that on average distinguished the period between 1945 and 1973. In the 1970s, economic growth as measured by the Gross Domestic Product began its slow decline from 4.4 percent in the 1960s to 1.8 percent in the first half of the 1990s. Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve and supported by a surprising number of economists, stated that the United States lacks the capacity in manpower, machinery, and efficiency, to produce at a rate higher than 2.2 percent without causing unacceptable inflationary pressures. Labor productivity has also declined since the 1970s. For all of 1995, for example, the productivity of labor was 1.2 percent, significantly lower than the thirtyyear average, and it's the principal reason for wage stagnation. Corporations have been unwilling to raise wages without a corresponding increase in productivity. Furthermore, there is a discrepancy between what Clinton and Dole offer as solutions and what the country can actually do in the best of all possible worlds. Clinton seems to recognize the existence of this discrepancy. If layoffs are to continue in corporate America, certain employee benefits should be made portable by law. Workers laid off should be able to retain an interest in the pensions set up for them on retirement. Health benefits should be portable, regardless of employee status at the time of being laid off. Dole seems uncertain what to offer. His failure to see worker Angst and to recognize the problem of stagnant wages during the New Hampshire primary marks Dole as a candidate without much empathy for working Americans. Dole can't simply restart the engine of economic growth by pushing a few buttons. It won't work. Some authorities believe that education or rather the lack of an early childhood education is one explanation of why economic growth will be slow well into the 21st century. However, whatever the reason or reasons are, they will certainly be debated during the presidential campaign. The debate over welfare reform will continue right through the summer and up to Election Day in November, but there will be new dimensions to the debate. State governors, at least a majority of them, want the Republican Congress to send funds to the states as block grants without federal restrictions. Doing so would end welfare as an entitlement program. That is, a person is entitled to welfare if he or she meets federal guidelines. Another exception to the rules allows the Department of Health and Human Services to approve a state request for a waiver of certain requirements. See 42 U.S.C. 1115. This section was fully explained in Beno et al v. Shalala et al, 30 F.3rd 1057 (9th Cir. 1994). In this case, the Ninth Circuit vacated the approval granted to California's Department of Social Services under the Bush Administration in 1992. By letter of February 29, 1996 Health and Human Services granted California


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a new waiver with conditions. The letter addressed to Eloise Anderson, Director California Department of Social Services stated in part that: "The [Clinton] Administration believes that the federal government must give states the flexibility to design new approaches to their local problems, provided these proposals meet Federal standards...." If California accepts the federal guidelines, monthly AFDC benefits will be reduced from $607 for a family of three to $594 per month -- about $5 per hour, assuming a 40-hour work week. But Anderson has other ideas. She asserts that parents who can't support their children after two years will have demonstrated their unfitness as parents, justifying removal of the children and into foster care placement. Governor Pete Wilson fully supports this Dickensian solution first mentioned in the literature of over a hundred years ago. Foster care in its current form should be viewed with skepticism in 1996. At least twenty-one states are under court supervision because they failed to take proper care of children who had been abused or neglected in foster homes. In all, child welfare programs are now being carried out under court orders or consent decrees in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois,Indianna, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah, Washington, and West Virginia. The courts often compare the rights of children in foster care situations to those of prison inmates and adults committed to mental hospitals against their will. In both cases, such children are deemed to be in state custody. Thus, these children are protected by the Fourteenth Amendment which says that no state shall "deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Cf. Smith v. Organization of Foster Families for Equality & Reform, 431 U.S. 816 (1977). Foster children have a right to be protected against physical harm and psychological abuse. They have a right to food, shelter, and medicalcare. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan wrote perhaps the most vivid description of abuse and neglect of foster children in Lashawn A. v. Sharon Pratt Dixon, in her capacity as Mayor of the District of Columbia, 762 F. Supp. 959 (DC 1991). He wrote: "This is a class action brought on behalf of children who are in foster care....and children who, although not yet in the care of the Department of Human Services, are known to the department because of repeated abuse or neglect. It is a case about thousands of children, who due to family financial problems, psychological problems, and substance abuse problems....rely on the District to provide then food, shelter and day-to-day care. It is about beleaguered city employees trying their best to provide these necessities while plagued with excessive case loads, staff shortages, and budgetary constraints. It is about the failures of ineptly managed child welfare systems, the


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indifference of former Mayor Marion Barry's administration and the resultant tragedies for District children relegated to entire childhoods spent in foster care drift. Unfortunately, it is about a lost generation of children whose tragic plight is being repeated every day....Kevin E. [a named plaintiff] came into custody following his release from the hospital 20 days after he was born. Kevin is now eleven years old....He told hospital staff that he hated himself and he climbed into a trash can and asked to be thrown away."

With this scenario from Dante's Inferno, what the Republicans of the 104th Congress propose is a monstrous act of institutionalized inhumanity. Rejection of the poor by ordinary Americans is not unlike the genocide carried out by ordinary Germans during the Holocaust. Daniel Goldhagen in his book, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. described the genocide of ordinary Germans. "They were animated," he wrote, "by a particular type of antisemitism that led them to conclude that Jews ought to die....Simply put, the perpetrators, having consulted their own convictions and morality and having judged the mass annihilation of Jews to be right, did not want to say `no." Children did not ask to be condemned to foster care homes of such decrepitude and lack of compassion. Yet, the willing executors of the laws in twenty-one states guarantee that children will be condemned to a non-caring environment not unlike the concentration camps of Nazi Germany or Stalinist gulags in the Soviet Union. Here, we have no Auschwitz-Birkenau, only ineptly managed, poorly staffed, and underfunded foster homes. For at least a century, ordinary Americans have long believed that the poor ought to be excluded from America's mainstream, that capital punishment is the best way of disposing of persons convicted of certain crimes. Thus, three convictions of any crime, including the theft of a bicycle, are enought to isolate that person from society for life, and that the mentally ill should be confined for the convenience of everyone else. There is no other explanation for the poorhouse or orphanage, the mental hospitals that used to exist. One may almost hear the collective sigh of relief when one more person is murdered legally by lethal injection. In the last half of the 20th Century, the Republican Congress wants to go further. In early 1994, Newt Gingrich recommended orphanages for children of a mother who had lost welfare benefits. Evidently, the Speaker had not read DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, 489 U.S. 189 (1989). In this case, the Supreme Court held that state employees of the Department of Social Services was not liable for the abuse of a child entrusted to their supervision. The child was confirmed to a state institution suffering from brain damage. His father had beaten him. The state agents had abundant actual knowledge of the physical abuse


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producing the harm to the child. He lost the protection of those naturally responsible for his welfare. The more extreme members of the 104th Congress want to end welfare, but if they can't get that passed a block grant to the states will do as well. The federal funds will be allocated in California by Eloise Anderson, Director of California's Social Services Agency. She thinks parents who can't support their children after two years are clearly unfit. About 1.2 million clildren in California alone will end up as occupants of foster homes if their single parent can't find work within two years. California's foster homes are scarcely better managed or staffed than those described in the District of Columbia. In this continuing saga of foster homes, a hearing en banc was granted in LaShawn v. Barry on January 30, 1996, 1996 U.S. App. Lexis 4404. As of this date, the case -- March 25, 1996 -this case had not been scheduled for oral argument. In 1994, the Republicans promised a revolution.They got their revolution from a predictable source, the Supreme Court of the United States on March 27, 1996. By a 5-4 vote, this court shifted unprecedented power to the states, but did not make states accountable to their citizens for all their actions. See Seminole Tribe v. Florida, 1996 U.S. Lexis 2165. This landmark case held that the Seminole Tribe could not sue the State of Florida to enforce a Congressionally-mandated duty to negotiate in good faith to form the compact required by the Indian Gaming Regulation Act of 1988. The Eleventh Amendment to the Constitution was held to be an absolute bar to such a suit in a federal court, except in cases arising under the Fourteenth Amendment. The 5-4 majority also expressly overruled Pennsylvannia v. Union Gas Co., 491 U.S. 1 (1989) as being "wrongly decided." In that case, the Supreme Court held that the Comprehensive Environmental Respsonse, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA) as amended by the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1896 (SARA) permitted a suit for monetary damages against a state in federal court. In 1989, Congress had the authority to create such a cause of action when legislating pursuant to the Commerce Clause, but no longer, if the rule announced in is broadly applied. Furthermore, Congress has the authority to override states' sovereign immunity under the Eleventh Amendment when legislating pursuant to the Commerce Clause. However, Pennsylvannia v. Union Gas Co. was expressly overuled leaving nothing to replace the emptiness of judicial reasoning in Seminole Tribe v. Florida As the dissent noted, other cases may now be revisited and possibly dismissed. The constitutional implications are startling. In re Merchants Grain, Inc., 59 F.3rd 630 (7th Cir. 1995) for example, implicates the authority of Congress to legislate pursuant to the bankruptcy provisions of the Constitution. The Bankruptcy Court issued a money judgment against a


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state. Chavez v. Arte Publico Press, 59 F.3rd 539 (5th Cir. 1995) implicates Congressional power with respect to the copyright provisions of the Constitution. Here, the court held that a state university could be sued in federal court to recover money damages for copyright infringement. Neither of these examples offer much promise for relief from state action in the federal courts creating a federal claim in the future, unless the absurd doctrine of sovereign immunity is rejected, or courts find states have waived it. Only civil rights protected by the Fourteenth Amendment will survive. Welfare reform has proved to be an inflammatory campaign issue during 1996. The Republicans of the 104th Congress propose to end federally-supported welfare by making block grants to each state and letting them provide welfare to the financially needy. Politically, passage of welfare reform in 1996 seems doubtful. And until Congress recognizes that approximately two-thirds of all AFDC beneficiaries are children, no reform has much of a chance in an election year. This means that about 9 million children would be affected in the AFDC program alone.Republicans have already reduced funding for programs such as school lunch and food stamps. Children by themselves are unable to organize, but they have Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund located in Washington. On June 1, 1996 an estimated 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial. No politicians were invited to speak at this Stand for Children, but the roster of organizations that appeared was impressive. It listed the Catholic Family Service, the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the American Association of Retired Persons, the Police Athletic League, the National Organization for Women (NOW), some eighty branches of the Junior League and many others. Women gor the right to vote in 1920. Since then, they have become politically astute in mobilizing public opinion in support of gender-related causes, such as affirmative action and freedom of choice. But Stand for Children went beyond gender and brought jobs and families into the campaign. In its June 3, 1996 issue of The New Yorker, Betty Frieden wrote: In seminars and schools, in community centers and union halls, in churches and the offices of public-spirited businesses a new paradigm has quietly been taking shape. Perhaps its strongest unifying theme is a concern for children, who not only represent greatest vulnerabilities of our institutions, but also the future of those institutions. For many people, Stand for Children will mark the public debut of this new paradigm.

On May 22, 1996 Congressional Republicans unveiled welfare and Medicaid reform bills giving states vast new powers while trimming $125 billion over six years. Medicaid provides health care to about 36 million low-income Americans. Welfare and Medicaid reform were combined in Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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one measure, thereby reducing the chances of passage in 1996 to from thin to none. Welfare is associated with a number of myths that need to be dispelled; Congressional Republicans expect the presidential campaign to include welfare-Medicaid debates they hope to win. The myths include the speculation that poor women have more children due to the incentive of higher welfare benefits. New Jersey's "family cap" experiment confirmed what voluminous evidence of birth patterns has always shown: welfare plays virtually no role in the rise of-out of wedlock births. Furthermore, the real value of AFDC benefits has declined by 37 percent since 1976, while the monthly benefits are not adjusted upward for inflation.Another myth is the money-spent argument to produce a failure. Proponents of this myth note the government has spent over $5 Trillion on welfare since the 1960s, and it hasn't worked. Spending on AFDC, the program normally referred to as welfare, was about $16.3 billion a year from 1964 to 1994. And the number of people with incomes below the poverty line increased over the same thirty-year period. Listen to a recent discussion hosted by KQED in San Jose, California on June 6, 1996. The subject was "Silicon Valley's Working Environment". This is in RealAudio format.

The redistribution of both income and wealth is being played out in Palo Alto, California labor dispute. An estimated one-third of Silicon Valley's workers earn less than $15,000 a year. Executives at not only the old timers like Hewlett Packard, Advanced Micro Devices, and Oracle Systems but also the new companies like Netscape Communications and Yahoo Incorporated -- initial public offerings by these two companies made their executives overnight millionaires -- are paid salaries as much as 700 times the yearly wages of the highest-paid janitor who cleans their offices. Four years before this labor dispute, the Service Employees International Union, Local 1887 (S.E.I.U.) put on a coordinated campaign to enlarge its membership. In 1996, its approximately 5,000 members struck Silicon Valley companies in a strike reminescent of the last century. There was only one major difference; employers didn't ask the police or the state to send in strikebreakers. The only real issues were living wages, health benefits, and a retraining trust subsidized by employers. About ten years ago, janitors would have worked directly for employers such as Hewlett Packard and been paid a livable $12 to $13 an hour with a chance at advancement up the company ladder. Today, these janitors work for an independent contractor for about $6 per hour and no employer-paid health care. The hourly rate translates into $11,520 a year gross pay -- no withholding -- an amount below the federal poverty level for a family of three. Employers contend that janitors are paid more, $8 per hour. This rate translates to $15,360 per year, and no janitor has any chance or


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expectation of advancement within the company. Janitors, at least 80 percent of those in Silicon Valley are not employees of the high tech companies; they work for janitorial service companies as temporaries and without health care. This practice of "unbundling" is a national trend that manufacturing companies have exploited to earn more money for shareholders, a perfectly legitimate position. The public, however, has become far more aware than ever before of economic unfairness. Public awareness of unfair corporate practices was an issue exploited by Patrick Buchanan, a Republican who campaigned and lost as an economic populist. Unbundling of services is not the same as outsourcing the production of parts for products assembled or manufactured and sold either domestically or internationally. Defined, outsourcing is the purchase and installation locally of parts made by others. Singapore, for example, leads the world in hard drive production for computers, and Taiwan is the world leader in production of motherboards and power supplies. Whether Hewlett Packard or Sun Microsystems and other companies manufacture these parts for their own products is probably a closely guarded secret. In any event, if they do, the cost is probably lower than the domestic price offered, for example, by Seagate which manufactures hard disk drives in the United States. Unbundling of services, however, has a human cost. Those who once got $12 or $13 per hour as janitors are now paid less than half that and have no health or retraining benefits at all. Their former employers made a conscious decision that janitors were disposable as employees, so long as a subcontractor arranged to have their windows washed and floors swept by the same people they once paid as employees. Disposable employees are naturally paid much less than they once got, but their former employers now make bundles of cash in savings. Labor costs were down, and so was the cost of health care and retraining. Unbundling also short-circuits the traditional paths of upward mobility, trapping lower-rung workers into a lifetime of dead end, insecure jobs. he 1996 Poverty Guidelines published in the Federal Register by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) show that for a family of three, the poverty level is $12,940 per year. These guidelines establish eligibility for Head Start, the Food Stamp program, the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance program, and the National School Lunch program, but not the Aid To Families with Dependent Children program. The HHS Guidelines also advise that for each additional child, the poverty level should be raised by $2,620. Without major concessions from the Silicon Valley employers, members of the Service Employees International Union will be condemned to a servitude not of their making. Their monthly wages are not enough to live on. East Palo Alto, California adjoins Silicon Valley but has rental rates exceeding $1,500 a month -$18,000 a year -- in substandard housing. More often than not, occupants


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of this housing crowd an entire family of three or more in to space designed for less. And even if both parents work at $8 per hour, their combined joint income leaves about $1,000 a month for all the other necessities of life, food, clothing, and health care for both parents and two or more children. The economic plight of Silicon Valley's janitors--not enough to live onis illustrated by an article in the June, 1996 issue of Harper's Magazine as a reprint of a speech given to students at Ponoma College earlier this year by Richard Rorty. Appropriately, the reprint is entitled "The Intellectuals and the Poor," and its opening sentence is a hint at what follows. "If one accepts the premise that the basic responsibility of the American left is to protect the poor against the rapacity of the rich, it's difficult to argue that the postwar years have been particularly successful ones." Rorty observed, however, that the left's one successful postwar triumph was the success of the civil rights movement." The language of rights is the language of the documents that have sparked the most successful attempts to relieve human suffering in postwar America -- the series of Supreme Court decisions that began with Brown v. Board of Education and continued with Roe v. Wade. The Brown decision launched the most successful appeal to the consciences of Americans since the Progressive Era. Another postwar line of cases that Rorty might have mentioned began with Mapp v. Ohio, Miranda v. Arizona and Baker v. Carr. In Mapp, the Supreme Court reinforced the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution; in Miranda Baker and related cases it required equitable apportionment of Congressional and other districts to comply with the one-man-one-vote mandated by the decisions in Reynolds v. Sims. In 1965, Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This measure required the apportionment of Congressional districts in the South and approval of such districts by the Department of Justice. In 1975, Congress added Texas to the list of states that must join the list of Southern states required to get preclearance of Congressional districts under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Civil rights activists saw Texas as dragging its feet on voting by black Americans. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) represented society's willingness to admit that the behavior of white Americans towards the descendants of slaves was, and continued to be, incredibly cruel -- that it was intolerable that American citizens should be subjected to the humiliation of segregation. Affirmative action is an extension of equal protection of the laws. And Colin Powell, until his retirement in 1995, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has firm views on affirmative action. He believes that black Americans will need affirmative action until such time as there


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is no discrimination on account or race or gender. Republican officials want General Powell to signify his willingness to accept the nomination to the vice presidency at their convention in August. This move is tantamount to an admission that Bob Dole cannot win the black vote on his own in November. Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, Secretary of Transportation, 115 S. Ct. 2097 (1994), and desegregation in the nation's public schools. Missouri v. Jenkins U.S. ___,115 S. Ct. 2038 (1995) [Listen to the Missouri v. Jenkins case at Oyez Oyez], another 5-4 decision. In this second case, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote for the majority which included Justices Scalia and Kennedy. The court held that orders designed to attract non-minority students -- magnet schools in the inner city paid for by Kansas City -- from outside the school district into the school district adjoining it sought an interdistrict goal that was beyond the scope of an intradistrict violation. Justices Thomas and O'Connor filed separate concurring opinions. Justices Souter, Stevens, Ginsberg, and Breyer all filed separate dissenting opinions. The Supreme Court has all but ended the right of black Americans to vote for members of Congress who may share the views of the minority communities in many states. Rorty's views suggest that the court's decisions in reapportionment cases have become the supreme law of the land "for no better reason than to give itself the sadistic pleasure of humiliating a group designated as inferior -designated as such for no better reason than to give another group a sense of superiority." Sadism, however, is not the only cause of cruelty and needless suffering. There is also selfishness. Selfishness differs from sadism in being more realistic and more thoughtful....If I own a business and pay my workers more than the minimum necessary to keep them at work, there will be less for me... If I prevent my slaves or the descendants of my ancestors' slaves, from getting an education, there will be less chance for them to compete with me and my descendants for the good jobs. If suburbanites cast their votes in favor of financing public education through locallyadministered property taxes, there will be less chance for children in the cities to be properly educated, and to compete with suburban children for membership in a shrinking middle class. All these calculated actions are cruel and selfish, but it would be odd to call them sadistic.

In two recent cases, the Supreme Court has adopted the rationale of selfishness to support the denial to black Americans of rights granted by Congress in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The New York Times of June 15, 1996 condemned both in an editorial appropriately entitled "Demeaning Democracy." It noted that Plessy v. Ferguson decided 100 years ago "set back the cause of racial justice by approving the doctrine of `separate but equal' facilities." The South wasted no time in legislating the requirement of separate facilities. These included intrastate transportation, Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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local public schools, hospitals, hotels, drinking fountains, restaurants, theaters, and cemeteries -- cradle to grave segregation. In two 5-4 decisions, the Supreme Court demonstrated "a perverse determination to resegregate the nation's politics," by invalidating a Texas and North Carolina redistricting plans as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. In all fifty states the 1990 Census required new redistricting plans, and Texas became entitled to three new Congressional seats. Population growth since 1980 had been substantial enough to require these new seats in accordance with Article I, section 2 of the Constitution. In 1990, the Hispanic population had grown by 1.35 million persons, or 45.4 percent; the black American population had grown by 283,818 persons, or 16 percent; and the Anglo population had grown by 941,818 persons, or 10.1 percent. Virtually all of this population had occurred in four Texas counties, Dallas, Bexar, Harris, and Houston. So in 1991, the Texas State Legislature began its redistricting, some of it by computer using REDAPPL software. This program was able to generate racial and other information right down to the block level. On completion of its redistricting plan, the State Legislature sent it to the Department of Justice for preclearance as required by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a preclearance that was granted under the Bush Administration. The plan was almost immediately challenged by six Texas voters. After a trial and the admission of massive evidence, the redistricting plan was set aside by a three-judge federal court as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Vera et al v. Richards 861 F. Supp. 1304 (ED Tex. 1994). Governor George Bush, Jr. and others took a direct appeal to the Supreme Court. In a plurality opinion, Justice O'Connor delivered the judgment of the court affirming the District Court. Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Kennedy joined Justice O'Connor, while Justices Scalia and Thomas wrote separate concurring opinions. Four justices wrote three separate dissenting opinions, Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsberg, and Breyer. See Bush, as Governor of Texas et al v. Vera et al, __, U.S. __, 96 DAR 6810. As drawn, new Districts 18, 29, and 30 were irregular in shape, and the map showed fingers extending outward to include the homes of potential candidates for Congress who were then members of the Texas House of Representatives; they had indicated an interest in seeking higher office in Washington. At the trial level, the state conceded that "Districts 18, 29, and 30 were created for the purpose of enhancing the opportunity to elect minority representatives to Congress." Justice O'Connor, however, looked to other factors to support her opinion. The three districts, she wrote, were departures from traditional redistricting principles such as compactness, contiguity, respect for political subdivisions, and community of interest. Historically, however,


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Texas had never applied these principles despite its long history of racial discrimination. Justice O'Connor also had to ignore the fact that the odd shapes of the districts from a messy and hard-to-disentangle mix of factors, not the least of which was the legislative goal of a statewide redistricting plan that preserved the Congressional seats of white incumbent members of Congress. Another objective of the Texas State Legislature was compliance with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Compliance was essential; without it, the redistricting plan submitted could not have gotten the preclearance from the Department of Justice. Previous decisions of the Supreme Court had held that a racial gerrymander was permissible, but the state would have to have a compelling interest and narrowly tailor the remedy to justify the state interest. In delivering the judgment of the court, Justice O'Connor used lofty language and empty formalisms. Justice Stevens, joined by Justices Ginsberg and Breyer filed a stinging dissent. First, I believe that the Court has misapplied its own tests for racial gerrymandering, both by applying strict scrutiny to all three of these districts, and then by concluding that none can meet strict scrutiny. In asking whether strict scrutiny should apply, the Court improperly ignores the `complex interplay' of political and geographical considerations that went into the creation of Texas' new districts....and focuses exclusively on the role race played in the State's decision to adjust the shape of its districts. A quick comparison of the unconstitutional majority-minority districts with three equally bizarre majority-Anglo districts....demonstrates that race was not necessarily the predominant factor contorting the district lines. I would follow the fair implications of the District Court's findings and conclude that Texas' entire map is a political, not a racial gerrymander. Even if strict scrutiny applies, I would find these districts constitutional, for each considers race only to the extent necessary to comply with the State's responsibilities under the Voting Rights Act, while achieving other race-neutral political and geographical requirements. The plurality's findings to the contrary unnecessarily restricts the ability of states to conform their behaviors to the Voting Rights Act while simultaneously complying with other race-neutral goals. Second, even if I concluded that these districts failed an appropriate application of still-developing law to appropriately read facts, I would not uphold the District Court's decision. The decisions issued today serve merely reinforce my conviction that the Court has, with its analytically distinct jurisprudence of racial gerrymandering, struck out in a jurisprudential wilderness that lacks a constitutional core and threatens to create harms more significant than any suffered by the individual plaintiffs challenging these districts.

After the Court's decision in Seminole Tribes v. Florida, 517 U.S. __ (1996), one might have expected the Court to have been more deferential to the states than the rule announced on April 16, 1996. In that case, the Supreme Court immunized the state from being sued in federal court to


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enforce a right granted by Congress. The Court cited the Eleventh Amendment to the Constitution and sovereign immunity to support another 5-4 decision. However, redistricting Congressional districts after each decennial Census is a most difficult job for state legislatures, so they should have discretion to exercise political judgments necessary to balance competing interests. Justice O'Connor's opinion has both trivialized the right to vote, but she has also stripped Texas of any discretion. The same might be said with respect to a second redistricting plan, this time, one in North Carolina Shaw et al v. James Hunt, as Governor of North Carolina et al, 517 U.S. __ (1996). In that case, the Supreme Court held that the North Carolina redistricting plan violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, because it was a redistricting plan not narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest. North Carolina had attempted to remedy past discrimination, citing its efforts to do so as a compelling state interest. Chief Justice Rehnquist disagreed. "A generalized assertion of past discrimination in a particular industry or region," he wrote," is not adequate because it provides no guidance for a legislative body to determine the precise scope of the injury it seeks to remedy....Accordingly, an effort to alleviate the effects of societal discrimination is not a compelling [state]interest." Rehnquist simply dismissed evidence of societal discrimination appearing in an article entitled "After 120 Years: Redistricting and Racial Discrimination in North Carolina." He found this detailed study irrelevant; it had not been seen by the members of North Carolina's General Assembly when it enacted the redistricting scheme. Justice Stevens dissented, joined by Justices Ginsberg and Breyer. Justice Stevens stated in part: As I have explained on prior occasions, I am convinced that the Court's aggressive supervision of state action designed to accommodate the historical concerns of disadvantaged minority groups is seriously misguided. A majority's attempt to enable the minority to participate more effectively in the process of democratic government should not be viewed with the same hostility that is appropriate for oppressive and exclusionary abuses of power....But even if we accept the Court's refusal to recognize any distinction between two vastly different kinds of situations, we should affirm the judgment of the District Court in this case.

The fate of the black American vote in both Texas and North Carolina, not to mention all the states of the Old Confederacy should not be left to the whim of a misguided Supreme Court majority of five justices. Some of them have carried their own personal agendas to the Supreme Court. One of them is William Rehnquist. In 1952, he clerked for the late Justice Jackson, and wrote a memorandum on a case to be considered by the


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Supreme Court. In it, Rehnquist wrote that Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that perpetuated racial discrimination in the South was right and should be followed in Brown v. Board of Education. Fortunately for posterity, a unanimous court expressly overruled Plessy in 1954, and separate but equal schools were no longer the law of the land. People should know that these five justices were all appointed by a Republican president. Rehnquist in 1972 by Nixon and promoted to Chief Justice by Reagan in 1986; O'Connor appointed by Reagan in 1986; Scalia in 1986 by Reagan; Kennedy in 1988 by Reagan; and Thomas by Bush in 1991. Perhaps these five should wear the white hoods and robes so often chosen by the Ku Klux Klan. Nor is the judiciary the only obstacle to the advances of civil rights. Senator Trent Lott (Rep. Miss.) has become the new Majority Leader in the Senate. He was elected by his Republican colleagues to replace Senator Dole who resigned to run for president. Newt Gingrich is the widely unpopular Speaker of the House, so the legislative branch of government is controlled by Republicans for the first time in forty years. In 1983, when Lott was a member of the House, he filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983). In his brief, Lott argued the point he lost in the Supreme Court; the Internal Revenue Service had the statutory authority to deny tax exempt status to the university that practiced racial discrimination in its admissions policy. Bob Jones University was located in Greensville, South Carolina. It operated a school with an enrollment of about 5,000 students from kindergarten through college and graduate school. The university was dedicated to the teaching and propagation of its fundamentalist Christian beliefs. However, Bob Jones University discriminated against black Americans in its admissions policy. In 1970, the Internal Revenue Service notified the university it would challenge its tax-exempt status for practicing racial discrimination. The IRS did so because of the holding in another court that racially discriminatory private schools were not entitled to exemption under Sec. 501 (c) (3). See Green v. Connally, 330 F.Supp. 1150 (1971) which approved the IRS construction of the Internal Revenue Code. Green was summirarily affirmed as Coit v. Green at 404 U.S. 997 (1971). Thus, there was no reason for filing an amicus curiae brief arguing that only Congress could revoke the University's tax exempt status. The Supreme Court disagreed. Chief Justice Burger wrote for the majority. Bob Jones University argued that IRS policy as embodied in Revenue Ruling 71-447 could not constitutionally be applied to schools that engage in racial discrimination on the basis of sincerely held religious beliefs. Burger wrote that "the Government has a fundamental, overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education -- discrimination that


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prevailed with official approval for the first 165 years of this Nation's constitutional history. That governmental interest substantially outweighs whatever burden denial of tax benefits places the exercise of religious beliefs." A contrary result would require all taxpayers to subsidize racial discrimination at the Bob Jones University, and the Court did not like this idea. The 1995-96 Term of the Supreme Court ended on July 1, 1996 with yet another affirmative action case postponed indefinitely. In Hopwood v. University of Texas, the Supreme Court agreed to postpone a hearing from an appeal taken by the University after a decision against it in the 8th Circuit. 1996 U.S. App. Lexis 4719. Justice Ginsberg wrote a oneparagraph opinion joined by Justice Souter. Texas et al v. Hopwood et al, 1996 U.S. Lexis 4267. Whether it is constitutional for a public college or graduate school to use race or national origin as a factor in its admissions process is an issue of great national importance. The petition before us, however, does not challenge the lower courts' judgment that the particular admissions procedure used by the University of Texas Law School in 1992 was unconstitutional. Acknowledging that the 1992 program has long since been discontinued and will not be reinstated....the petitioners do not defend that program in this Court....Accordingly, we must await a final judgment on a program genuinely in controversy before addressing the important question raised in this petition....(Citations omitted).

Thus, the question at this time has no answer, and an answer is expected to take at least two years. However, the Clinton Department of Justice criticized the 8th Circuit opinion in Hopwood v. Texas. An Associate Attorney General of the Department of Justice said he thought this case was "wrong as a statement of how the Constitution ought to be interpreted." And the Department of Education in Washington, after a seven-year study, concluded that the aggressive affirmative action program at the University of California at Berkeley was legal and did not discriminate against white students. It found that the academic quality of the student body increased as the campus became more diverse. Grades, test scores, and student performance all rose with student diversity. There is a compelling state educational interest in diversity on campus. Toward the end of the presidential campaign some Republicans brought up the issue of pardons for some or all of the White water defendants or even those who might be indicted for a related crime. In response to one question Clinton said he would have no comment. The pardon issue needs some history.


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Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution gives the president the "Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for all offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment." In Ex Parte Garland, 71 U.S. 333 (1867), the Supreme Court ruled that a pardon "extends to every offense known to the law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings, or during their pendency, or after convocation and judgement." In recent history, three presidents have granted pardons. In 1974, President Gerald Ford granted former President Nixon "a full, free and absolute pardon... for all offenses against the United States which he had committed or may have committed or taken part in." In 1977, President Jimmy Carter issued a blanket amnesty -amnesty being a species of pardon -- to all persons who had unlawfully evaded the military draft during the Vietnam War. Both presidents exercised the pardon power to restore the tranquility of the commonwealth. Then on Christmas Eve of 1991, President George Bush granted a pardon to all persons involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, including the then-Secretary of Defense, Casper W. Wienberger and five others involved in the scandal at the highest levels. This scandal had occupied the attention of the public and media since 1991, when President Reagan signed a "finding pursuant to Section 642 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as amended concerning operations undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency in foreign countries, other than those intended solely for the purpose of intelligence collection." Bush signed it on December 1, 1991, and it authorized the CIA to "support and conduct paramilitary operations against... Nicaragua." The Director of the CIA was required to report to Congress pursuant to Section 501 of the National Security Act of 1947. The Iran-Contra scandal surfaced in 1986 or thereabouts and eventually a Special counsel was named to look into the entire matter. Lawrence Walsh issued his report before Bush was defeated by Bill Clinton in 1992. However the major media had been so bust trying to seep away their unsavory legacy left by Bush, that they never really fully grappled with the scandal itself. In 1992, Senator Bob Dole, now a presidential candidate, praised George Bush for pardoning the Iran-Contra defendants. On Face the Nation of November 1992, Dole said Bush's pardon "was a Christmas Eve act of courage and compassion." Initially, Dole criticized Ford for his pardon of Nixon. However, when Dole ran as Ford's running mate in 1976 he reversed himself. Dole praised Ford for pardoning his predecessor. The last of the nationally televised debates between Clinton and Dole took place on October 16, 1996, only three weeks before the election on November 5, 1996. The two candidates had agreed on a Town Hall format; a carefully selected but random panel of over a hundred people sat in a theater setting and asked issue-related questions of Dole and clinton.


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They had 60 seconds to answer the questions and 20 seconds to reply to the other candidates rebuttal of 30 seconds. By the end of the fiscal year 1996, October 1, 1997 the assets of the United States will be a pathetic amount measured by property, plant and equipment, about $2 trillion. Its liabilities, however, will be an astronomical $22 trillion. Social Security, Medicare, and other federal pensions account for an estimated $17 trillion. For decades, Congress has treated Social Security surplus monies as part of the general funds and disbursed to pay for assets like aircraft carriers, and toxic waste dumps, to name a few such items. The Baby Boom generationã those born between 1946 and 1961 will begin to retire in 2008 and collect the Social Security they were promised. It won't be there. And even before 2008, the Medicare trust fund will have been exhausted. Demography and the need for health care by elders whose lives have been extended by medical advances will assuredly exhaust the Medicare trust fund. By the year 2020, the Social Security trust fund will run a deficit of about $232 billion, and there will be no surplus for Congress to spend. By the same year, Medicare will run a deficit of about $352 billion. Even before the middle of the next century -- 2040 -- both funds together will have run a total deficit of about $3.244 trillion. During the recent presidential campaign, Dole proposed a tax cut of 15 percent. This cut will reduce federal revenue by some $535 billion over six years. Clinton has proposed a smaller tax cut, but its cost remains unknown over the same time frame. Yet, during the presidential campaign, these scenarios remained undiscussed. Both Clinton and Dole knew the first candidate who leveled with the people would lose. A huge and growing population has the political clout to prevent any reasonable debate on these pressing national problems. Yet, the aging population will be the first to discover there's no money for their medical care and even less for their Social Security. And don't forget Medicaid, health care for the poorest citizens and Supplemental Social Insurance (SSI), enough to get by as inflation nibbles away at SSI's buying power. Both Social Security and Medicare are financed by payroll taxes, and each year the number of workers paying these taxes seems to diminish. By 2040, the cost of Social Security and Medicare has been projected to rise from 17 percent to between 35 percent and 55 percent of workers' payroll. This is an intolerable burden. Even at the low end of this projection, each working American with $35,000 in income will pay $12,180 in payroll taxes, and that worker will also have to compute income taxes on what may be left over. This is the stuff which sparks revolutions of the workers. This is especially true when the young working Americans have to support seniors who didn't set aside enough to support themselves after retirement; they had Social Security checks monthly and Medicare was right around the corner going broke.


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This American history textbook should end with the close of the 199596 term of the Supreme Court of the United States, July 1, 1996. It convenes again on the first Monday of October, 1996. The Court has had a long history, beginning with its first Chief Justice, John Jay, who took his oath of office on October 19, 1789. He had been nominated to the Court by George Washington, the nation's first president. Thus, the history appearing in this book covered a period of 207 years, not counting the period covered in Chapter Two, "In the Beginning." That chapter ended with the ratification of the Constitution by the thirteen original states in 1789 and the ratification of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, in 1791. Since then, I have tried to treat certain events in our history as defining our present. These events include the Civil War and Reconstruction, the expansion to the west after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the Manifest Destiny of Theodore Roosevelt, World War I, the 1920s, the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the War in Vietnam and World War II. This war transformed the United States in ways that surface today, more often than not guided by decisions of the Supreme Court, and the pace of change has accelerated with the development of new technology and the growth of the Internet. Since July 1, 1996 the Green Party has announced that nine states with 106 electoral college votes will offer citizens a choice in November. A year earlier, the Green Party had announced a draft of Nader. They should rethink this idea. No third party candidate has ever been elected in this century, and the only one who came close was George Wallace in 1968. Had he not run, Hubert Humphrey might have won. Instead, the voters got Richard Nixon in 1968 and Watergate in 1973. Nixon resigned in 1974, but not before he had nominated William Rehnquist as an associate justice. President Ford nominated Justice Stevens in 1975, and President Reagan nominated Justices Kennedy, O'Connor, and Scalia. Reagan also promoted Justice Rehnquist to be Chief Justice. President Bush nominated Justices Souter and Thomas, and President Clinton nominated Justices Ginsberg and Breyer. During the last two terms of the Supreme Court, Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsberg and Breyer have combined in dissenting to the judicial excesses of Rehnquist, Scalia, O'Connor, Kennedy, and Thomas. If Senator Dole defeats President Clinton, voters will blame Nader for the ego-fulfillment role he played. Voters may have a Republican in the White House, Republican control of the House, and a Supreme Court that has already moved far to the right. Nader will have a lot to answer to those who voted for Clinton despite his drawbacks. Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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Today, the United States is quite different from only four years ago. This is not offered as a criticism, only to note that programs offered as solutions in the past may no longer work without at least minor political surgery. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and his War on Poverty created solutions existing today. They include welfare, Medicare, and Medicaid. Other areas of concern to voters include crime, the environment, race relations, education, and job security. The need for change today has never been clearer, but the shape of that change will not fit the vessels of yesterday. A new class of people has emerged from the chaos, and its members belong to a new constituency that is the emerging new majority in American politics. They no longer see themselves as either Republican or Democrat; they will favor a solution that is more effective, more efficient, and less expensive than any partisan solution shaped by ideology. These people are the knowledge workers of the next century. In that period of four years, Bill Clinton has identified a new class of worker, the knowledge workers. Whether he did so on his own or with the help of others is irrelevant. The knowledge workers are the people who use the personal computer to process and disseminate information, so that any business enterprise can adapt quickly to the rapidly changing marketplace. Most companies today share information via local and wide area networks. The Internet seems clearly an extension of these networks. In its Findings of Fact, the District Court in Philadelphia stated "Today [in 1996], over 9,400,000 host computers worldwide, of which approximately 60 percent [are] located in the United States, are estimated to be linked to the Internet. This count does not include the personal computers people use to access the Internet using modems. In all, reasonable estimates are that as many as 40 million people around the world can and do access the enormously flexible communication Internet medium. That figure is expected to grow to 200 million Internet users by the year 1999." American Civil Liberties Union et al v. Janet Reno, Attorney General of the United States et al, F. Supp. (EDPa 1996). Bill Clinton sees the Internet as what it has become; in a global, highly competitive economy, the Internet will be the communication medium of the entrepreneur with a global market. Growth has already occurred and will make the Internet a global highway. Telecommunications, Inc., Comcast, and Time Warner,Inc. will soon equip most of the nation's public schools with highspeed cable modems allowing students to access the Internet at previously unimagined speeds. Some fifteen cable companies have made this offer. So, within a very few years, the nation's 95,000 public schools may all access the Internet. Accurate information will be available, and students may confirm what the get by using the Internet to access their Congressional representatives in the House and Senate. Congress has been slow in recognizing cyberspace, but within two years, all members of Congress will be online sending information to their wired constitutents.


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And this information age concept depends on delivery of quality on a global scale at a price customers are willing to pay. In a political environment, the shape of change is often concealed behind the partisan maneuvers. Welfare, for example, is a case in point. In 1995, Democrats led by Democratic Senators Barbara Mikulsi, Tom Daschle, and John Breaux presented a radical plan to the Senate in 1995 with the full support of Bill Clinton. The bill they introduced in 1995 actually abolished the AFDC program entirely. It went far beyond anything conservative Republicans had dared dream, by rejecting the idea of a two-year limitation on welfare in favor of an immediate obligation to work. Each applicant for welfare benefits had to look for a job. If an applicant could not find one, he or she had to sign a contract under which, in exchange for promising to take the first job offered, the recipient would be given a job placement voucher with which to get the kind of job counselling and training the applicant wanted. To ensure that work paid more than welfare, additional funds were added for child care, and Senator Breaux added a provision that required the states to maintain at least 80 percent of current welfare spending levels for the next five years. Republican presidential politics interfered with Senate approval. Gramm criticized Dole for being soft on illegitimacy and conditioned his support on the adoption of amendments requiring states to adopt a family cap and deny benefits to any beneficiary under 18 who had a new illegitimate child. Dole went along, and Senator Domenici added that anyone who believed a family cap that might cost a mother something like $75 in monthly benefit s also "believed in the tooth fairy." In any case, teenage mothers were given a chance to live in "second chance homes" offering community of interest to these mothers. As amended, the bill passed the Senate by an 87 to 12 vote, but the conference committee killed it by cutting children's elligibility for aid. Two-thirds of all AFDC beneficiaries were children, and it was grossly unfair to penalize them for the fact their mothers were on welfare. And by penalizing the pregnant teenage mothers, the Christian Coalition argued that abortions would increase, a remedy Dole opposed in 1972 when he was elected senator from Kansas. However, it's no secret that the number of children born to single mothers now represents about 30 percent of all children born in the United States. The Republicans seem to prefer orphanages for some of these unwanted children, but these are hardly a satisfactory solution for the 21st century. Dickens condemned them in the 19th century. Crime is often first on the list of voter concerns, and the voters want incarceration of criminals guilty of violent crimes. They fear the violence of crimes and the utter irrationality of murder, for example, and a criminal in jail cannot rape anyone. Republicans and a few Democrats have failed


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to distinguish between nonviolent and violent crimes. A politician soft on crime will probably lose the next election. Congress and the state legislatures should pay more attention to prevention of crime in general at the community level. Recently, the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica released the results of a two-year study of crime. It found that dollar-fordollar, programs that encouraged high-risk young people to finish school and stay out of trouble prevented five times as many crimes as stiff sentencing laws imposed on repeat offenders with so-called "three-strikesand-you're-out" laws. The Rand Corporation found several highly effective prevention programs. One of them provided cash and scholarships to keep students in high school. Participants earned money for extracurricular academic studies, community activities, and work. Over a four-year period, students could earn a maximum of $7,500 in stipends plus a matching amount in scholarship funds. These incentives increased graduation rates and college enrollment. As of 1996, this pilot project was funded by the Ford Foundation and the United States Department of Labor. Members of Congress are merely showboating for the political points earned by saying "I'm tougher on crime than my opponent." In fact, his opponent may well into a prevention program that would reduce the costs of crime and be more effective than stiff penalties. Alternative thinking is badly needed in the criminal justice system, as it moves into the information age. A new book by Morley Winograd and Dudley Buffa, Taking Control: Politics in the Information Age is recommended reading for those alternative thinkers. The authors of this book, both experienced Democratic operatives, make a statement on page 111: "Next to social security, Medicare is the most expensive entitlement program administered by the federal government." They're right, of course, a fact confirmed in June, 1996. In June, the trustees of the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund announced that, without more revenue or reduction in costs, Medicare would be bankrupt by the year 2001. The Hospital Insurance Trust Fund, Part A of Medicare, is financed by a 2.9 percent payroll tax divided equally between workers and their employers. Part B, which covers doctors' and other outpatients, is financed by in part by monthly insurance premiums but mostly by general revenue of the United States. The solvency of Part B is now in question. The latest figures on Part A show that expenditures are exceeding revenues to such an extent that the trust fund with a current surplus of $121 billion will be almost completely depleted in four years and run a deficit of $53 billion in the year 2001. The authors of Taking Control offer their own approach to dealing with Medicare. In the process, they have coined a new word, "chaord," which combines the seemingly opposite principles of chaos and order."

Systems, even those as complex as health care, can be made orderly when they repeat themselves in recognizable and measurable patterns that Get any book for free on: www.Abika.com

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oscillate between equilibrium and disequilibrium. A system in disequilibrium is said to be on the edge of chaos. A failure to change this state will eventually lead to the disintegration of the system. Part A of Medicare is a perfect example, but it cannot be allowed to disintegrate; too much is at stake. Without funds, most hospitals in the United States would close. Chaos. A chaordic system is one that exists between regulatory rigidity and flexibility. It concentrates on the rules governing the relationships among its parts; in the process, it creates coherent patterns that often resemble the fractal shapes of the new science of chaos. The end product is a system rigid enough to permit efficiency and fluid enough to permit effectiveness. The Clinton health care proposals in 1994 ended in defeat. There were at least three reasons for its defeat. In 1965, when Medicare was first enacted by Congress, it created a constituency, those over 65, more powerful than any other single constituency in the country. It even created a national organization_the American Association for Retired People (AARP)_that watched Medicare and reacted quickly to any threat to its existence. The medically indigent got Medicaid, and it, too, had powerful friends that established the legal parameters within which Medicaid operated. Congress had forgotten to establish principles, so eventually both programs began to spin out of control. Universal coverage was the first such principle, and the second was a rule prohibiting denial of coverage because of a preexisting medical condition. The third principle was one that made making all coverage portable; a change in employment had no effect on coverage. Furthermore, Congress did not repeal Section 106 of the Internal Revenue Code. It provided that no employer-paid health insurance was treated as taxable income to the employees who had no incentive to moderate his or her demand for services. As the cost of health care began to explode, money that would otherwise have been available for wage increases was used to pay rising insurance premiums. In a new, chaordic health care system, an insurance company would probably become the payer of last resort, eliminating the existing incentive to exclude claims and deny coverage. The insurance company would be liable only for the portion of the medical bill not paid by the patient because of a deductible. The authors of Taking Control have a better idea; health insurance policies must become life insurance policies. Whatever is not spent on health care may be converted to and paid as a life insurance. Patient and payer both have an incentive to lower costs. Furthermore, patient and payer want the same thing_the best possible health care at the lowest price and for the longest period of time. The authors of Taking Control offer several other fields where chaos theory may produce solutions. However, this theory may not be able to deal with what is likely


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to be a major campaign issue, wages for workers sufficient to give them a decent a standard of living. Politics must focus on the economic condition of working people. The new national organization, Campaign for America's Future, plans to spark a national debate that its founders say is long overdue. On July 17, 1996 they wrote in a position paper that "the measure of the economy is whether it works for working people. It is not sufficient for the wealthy to prosper, speculators to strike it rich, corporations to profit, if working people are not sharing fully in the rewards produced by their labor and productivity." The debate over a minimum wage of $5.15 an hour by 1997 is only the beginning. When fully effective in 1997, this wage will provide $9,888 per year, not enough to live on. In almost all presidential elections of this century , the outcome has been decided on domestic issues. Roosevelt won in 1932 because the country was sinking into the Great Depressiion. George Bush lost to Bill Clinton in 1992. There was a deep recession and Bush failed to recognize it. With this election of 1996, the outcome will probably be dermined on the basis of of economic and wage policies with a touch of foreign policy issues. It is scheduled for November 5, 1996. Voters have had little exposure to foreign policy with the exceptions of the Dayton Agreement. It was designed to settle issues in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia, once a part of Yugoslavia. More recently Iraq's Saddam Hussein chose sides between warring Kurdish factions. President Clinton chose to "punish" Hussein for violating various Security Council resolutions. After authorizing the use of aircraft and missiles, Clinton deployed 5,000 American troops to Kuwait to remind Hussein he could expect retaliation if he continued on his aggressive path. Actually, the outcome was rather simple. The United States extended the "no fly" zones within Iraq. Hussein has now agreed not to launch surface-to-air missiles (SAMS) against American jets patrolling these zones. Hussein probably has other plans, but the American public cannot expect Iraqi disclosure of these plans until after the action planned has actually happened. In the midst of this volatile exchange between the United States and Iraq, Republicans have apparently decided to bring foreign policy into the campaign as an issue. In July, 1996 Senator Bob Dole, once a Republican power in the Senate, resigned to run for president of the United States. After Dole resigned, Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi was elected as Senate Majority Leader. On September 11, Candidate Dole reasserted his influence with Lott and other Republicans, persuading them to shelve the Chemical Weapons Convention then before the Senate for ratification as a treaty. Two-thirds of those voting are constitutionally required to ratify a treaty that has been signed by 160 nations and ratified by 63. More formally entitled the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development,


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Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and the Destruction, this convention is a vitally important international treaty. By shelving it, he overlooked the fact that it had been negotiated by Presidents Reagan and Bush and was opened for ratification in Paris on January 13, 1993. Neither Iraq nor Iran had either signed or ratified this convention by September 16, 1996, but Candidate Dole mentioned only that the verification of compliance was not 100 percent and that it involved "intrusive paperwork." According to an editorial in the New York Times, "American military leaders, responsible political leaders of both parties, and the American chemical industry all [favored] the treaty." While the treaty may still be ratified in 1997, it may not enter into force without ratification of 65 nations. The history of chemical weapons began in 1675 when France and Germany agreed not to use poison bullets, and in 1899, the Hague Convention of that year prohibited the use of arms or material to cause unnecessary suffering, such as poison-filled projectiles. However, the first known use of poison gas took place in 1915, when the German army carried out a massive attack at Ypräs, Belgium during World War I. Chemical weapons caused 91,000 fatalities during this war, 1,500 American soldiers. Outrage at the effects of chemical weapons, led in 1925 to the signing of the Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and Bacteriological Methods of Warfare. Many states, including the United States signed this Protocol but reserved the right to retaliate in kind if used by nonsignatories. In 1971, the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament completed its work on the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological and Toxin Weapons. This convention was opened for signature in 1972 and entered into force in 1975. However, soon after this convention went into effect, Iran alleged that Iraq was using chemical weapons in its war against Iran in 1980. In March, 1984 the Secretary General of the United Nations set up an expert team to investigate the allegations. The team travelled to Iran and visited some of the affected areas as well as a medical ward in Teheran. Samples taken from unexploded Iraqi aerial bombs were shown to contain mustard gas, and some were found to contain a lethal nerve gas, tabun. Thus, from 1984, to 1988, the expert team and others proved use of chemical weapons by Iraq, including a large-scale aerial and artillery attack against civilian targets in 1987 and another large-scale Iraqi attack against Halabja in Iran. The Iraq-Iran War ended in 1989 with inclusive results, and Saddam Hussein began analyzing what he might obtain by attacking Kuwait which he did on August 2, 1990. Iraqi troops overwhelmed Kuwait rapidly, and Hussein announced that Kuwait had become Iraq's nineteenth province. Allegedly pursuant to United Nations Security Council, President George Bush deployed American troops to Saudi Arabia with the objective of


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ousting Iraqi troops from Kuwait. American troops were equipped with gas masks and chemical decontamination facilities against the possibility that Saddam might use chemical weapons, including nerve gas against the coalition forces assembled to oust the Iraqi Republican Guard from Kuwait. On February 28, 1991 President Bush prematurely declared victory for the coalition and announced a cease fire, noting that Kuwait City had been liberated with the defeat of Iraq's Republican Guard, Hussein's crack troops. There was a major deceit in this press statement from Bush. The aircraft, tanks, armored personnel, and artillery used by retreating Iraqi troops all survived and turned up later. Hussein used them to attack the Shia Muslims south and north of Baghdad. Most of these weapons were shipped to Iraq under export permits issued by the Bush Department of Commerce. Five years later, Saddam Hussein, who, by this time, had rebuilt Iraqi command, control and communication facilities seriously damaged by coalition aircraft, launched an attack against a dissident Kurdish faction in Erbil, the capitol of the autonomous Kurdish government. It was to be the destination of shipments of humanitarian aid to the Kurds from the West. President Clinton ordered air and missile strikes against key Iraqi facilities in what should now be described as Bush's Unfinished Business. Clinton also directed that F-117 Stealth aircraft and 5,000 American troops be deployed to enforce the expanded "no fly zone" within Iraq. Saddam Hussein almost certainly has concealed supplies of chemical weapons, and this possibility needs to be considered within the context of Dole's sabotage of the Chemical Weapons Convention, not because Dole has sided with Hussein, but because he seems incapable of understanding the policy implications of what he did with Republican support. Since the Gulf War, which ended in 1991, Americans have discovered the Middle East is a jungle. Yet, despite all the harsh rhetoric, U.S. leaders are almost happy to see Saddam Hussein stay on. As one analyst, Professor Adid Daweesha, who teaches Middle East History at George Mason University, puts it, "There are two main interests that Saddam serves as long as he remains in power. First of all he and Iraq will always be the other pole to confront Iran. In other words, the United States policy does not like to see Iran, which after all, is our other enemy, have a freewheeling hold on the area. And American foreign policy has always been to balance the power of Iran with Iraq and vice versa, and that would be the best way to safeguard the safety of the oil lanes and secondly, of our allies in the area and to have stability for Saudi Arabia....." On September 15, Professor Daweesha was interviewed by Daniel Zwerdling on National Public Radio. What follows is part of the interview.


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Daniel Zwerdling: In other words, as long as Saddam Hussein Hussein is in power, he will check Iran and we will not have as much to do. Professor Daweesha: Because if he goes out of power_let's say he's toppled or there is a coup against him_there is no guarantee that Iraq will continue as a state as it is now. In fact, there is just as good a chance of Iraq collapsing into three small statelets, one in the south for the Shiites, one in the center for the Sunnis, and one in the north for the Kurds. If that happens, then Iran, without any doubt, will become the dominant power in the Gulf, and that is something which does not coincide with the strategic interests of the United States in the area.. Daniel Zwerdling: OK. And the second policy interest it serves. Professor Daweesha: The second policy that we have is that as long as Saddam Hussein is there, he continues to be a threat to the countries of the Gulf, particularly, Saudi Arabia. And if that is the case, then they [the Saudis] will always have to come to us for protection. Protection has its price. We give protection, but we also get a price out of the Saudis, and the main price we get is stability of oil prices. We insure that we will not have a 1973 oil hike again as long as Saudi Arabia knows it depends on us for protection. And secondly, as long as Hussein is a threat, they will always need military hardware, and much of the military hardware is going to come from the United States..... Daniel Zwerdling: And because oil prices would come down, because there would be more oil on the market. Professor Daweesha: Absolutely. Daniel Zwerdling: And that would hurt the Saudis who are big producers? Professor Daweesha: Exactly, and it will create a lot of turmoil within OPEC and within the entire [world] oil market. I think more importantly is that if Saddam Hussein goes, there is a very good possibility that_that a democratic regime might come and that in itself_if you think of Iraq as being one of the most important Arab countries in the Gulf,


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if you have a vibrant democracy in Iraq, that in itself will probably be the most potent danger to the Saudi regime.... Daniel Zwerdling: So what are Americans supposed to make of all this? As we hear what you're telling us about having Saddam in power actually serves our interest in many ways, yet, on the other hand we see these military actions and all this saber rattling against Saddam Hussein, what's going on here? What is America trying to achieve? Professor Daweesha: Well, the United States is doing what any other superpower has been doing for centuries. The American public and people ought to realize the world out there is a jungle, and there is no such thing as right and wrong. There is a very large gray area [within which] we have massive interests, and these interests are sometimes contradictory..... The interview took place during the popular NPR segment of All Things Considered. However, the program ran out of time. Thus, it did not mention either the covert activities of the CIA and its plans to topple Saddam Hussein. So far as is known, all CIA operations against Saddam have all been disasters. Nor has the public ever been told of operations against Iran, or even if there are any. Ever since 1979, Iran, with the fall of the Shah then, has been ruled, by a collection of irrational mullahs who still refer to America as "The Great Satan." Even worse, Iran seems to have financed the training of terrorists in Syria. These terrorists have then been launched against the United States. Some authorities have even claimed Syrian-trained and Iran-financed terrorists were responsible for the World Trade Center bombing of almost three years ago, in which a number of Americans were killed and many wounded. If President Clinton somehow managed to topple the mullah's regime in Iran, he might be able to restore a minium dose of democracy to a nation whose people deserve better than their religious leaders have provided. Teheran is also thought to have financed the training of terrorists from Afghanistan with help from former East German experts. Were the United States to restore a measure of democracy to Iran, Israel would become a primary beneficiary, but only if Syrian President Hafez al-Assad shut down the Iran-financed terrorist training camps in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. A major task, it might even encourage Syria and Israel to discuss the future of the Golan Heights annexed by Israel in 1981 eight years after Israel occupied this strategic area used by Syria to attack Israel in 1973. Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said his government will never give up the Golan Heights. Accordingly, the peace process has stalled insofar as Syria is concerned. The Clinton Administration has so


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far failed to enlist Assad, despite some fifteen visits to Damauscus by Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and Secretary of State James Baker serving under former President George Bush. However, Assad might agree to consider closing the terrorist camps in exchange for financial help to rebuild Syria's deteriorating infrastructure with better schools, roads, housing, office buildings and light industry needed to launch Syria into the 21st century.


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An Abridged History of the United States

History of the United States

History of the United States

The United States Cavalry: An Illustrated History

United States History

The Untold History of the United States

The Untold History of the United States

The Untold History of the United States

Streams of History: The United States

A People's History of the United States

A history of the United States

A Brief History of the United States

A People's History of the United States

A Population History of the United States

Short History of the United States

A Patriot's History of the United States

A People's History of the United States

A People's History of the United States

A Patriot's History of the United States

History of the United States, Volume 5

History of the United States, Volume 4

People's History of the United States

A people's history of the United States

A People's History of the United States

A Patriots History of the United States

Gale Encyclopedia of United States Economic History

The United States Cavalry: An Illustrated History, 1776-1944

A Queer History of the United States (ReVisioning American History)

The United States of Air

United States of the Dead

The United States, 1763-2000 (Spotlight History)

An Abridged History of the United States

History of the United States

History of the United States

The United States Cavalry: An Illustrated History

United States History

The Untold History of the United States

The Untold History of the United States

The Untold History of the United States

Streams of History: The United States

A People's History of the United States

A history of the United States

A Brief History of the United States

A People's History of the United States

A Population History of the United States

Short History of the United States

A Patriot's History of the United States

A People's History of the United States

A People's History of the United States

A Patriot's History of the United States

History of the United States, Volume 5

History of the United States, Volume 4

People's History of the United States

A people's history of the United States

A People's History of the United States

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