Center for Labor Education & Research, University of Hawaii - West Oahu: Honolulu Record Digitization Project
Honolulu Record, Volume 10 No. 42, Thursday, May 15, 1958 p. 7
Star-Bulletin Columnist Talks
Doris Fleeson Says Economy Depends on War, Not Peace
The RECORD here scoops the Star-Bulletin which runs Doris Fleeson's column prominently on its editorial page. Here is Doris Fleeson speaking out on the Eisenhower administration, a view which the Star-Bulletin would blue pencil with a swift X over her copy. The daily has not run what the columnist said, which is newsworthy in these times.
Doris Fleeson, a nationally-syndicated columnist who is featured toy the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, has to trim her views to suit the bias of her subscribing papers — particularly those which cover up the failures of the Eisenhower administration.
in a speech before the annual convention of the National Farmers Union, Miss Fleeson did not have to consider editorial bias. Extracts from her speech follow:
"Today, we live in a world which, because media of communication have multiplied so enormously, the opportunities for propaganda have become infinitely greater.
"The New York Times chief correspondent in Washington, James Reston, wrote recently:
This administration is more interested in the appearance of leadership than in leadership itself, more in the appearance of power than in the reality of power.
"Certainly no American government has used the means and tools of propaganda to quite the same degree as the present one. It has for some time deeply troubled observers who see in it a denial of the processes on which a free .society must be based…
"Our real danger is that we may be trapped in our own propaganda inventions. It is bad enough that the American people have so little opportunity to distinguish between the real and the unreal. It is far more frightening that few of our leaders manage to escape the contagion of their own propaganda…
"It is perhaps the most remarkable fact of our tune that in the face of a universal desire for peace and hope for peace, that the best we find our leaders searching for is a state not of peace but of nonwar.
"Why is it that a state of non-war, with all its costs and all its tensions and all its wastefulness and dangers seems preferable to a state of peace?
"Respect for each other's murderous potential may "keep both of us (the U.S. and the Soviet Union) in a state of nonwar. It would take more than respect; it would require trust to achieve peace…
"The intimate collaboration which exists between the U.S. and Western Germany, between Prance and Western Germany, would have seemed unthinkable a dozen years ago. The friendship and mutual self-help which exists between the U.S. and Japan today would have appeared totally unbelievable 15 years ago…
"There is a very real question, carefully avoided on all sides in the Eisenhower administration and for some reason never mentioned by the Democrats. That is whether the economy of the U.S. could not tolerate a genuinely peaceful world situation.
"We are spending $45 billion a year on armaments vastly greater than all the money spent on relief and pump-priming during all the administrations of FDR. It is within shouting distance of the military budget for a hot war...
"There can be no question whatever that since the start of rearmament program that the U.S. economy has become more and more dependent on huge appropriations for defense.
We have actually seen the spectacle of the President saying that he looked for their increase to cure the present recession…
"It cannot be that the economists of the administration art-unaware of the dangers which will have to be faced in the economy if there comes a period in which a marked reduction in defense expenditures might be justified. Yet neither in the executive branch nor in the Congress controlled by the Democrats has a single step been taken to soften the shock of
a withdrawal of defense expenditures.
"It is only possible to conclude than no one in the government, including the Congress, has either confidence of peace or any sincere belief that any profound change in the situation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union will take place in the foreseeable future.
"This becomes even clearer when we look back to the efforts made during World War II to cushion the shock to the economy which was expected when the war ended You may remember that Henry Wallace wrote a book, 60 Million Jobs, pronounced hopelessly Socialistic by many of those who now feel that any words of caution about boom times are a gospel of gloom and doom.
"The U.S today is in fact totally unprepared for peace…
“It could be that the cost of such temporizing will be high Pat, rich old nations, like fat, rich old men — and women — tend to overestimate their powers. The Soviet Sputniks surely destroyed the myth that we are necessarily ahead in everything and that nature has a special interest in the survival of Americans."
It is only common humanity to feed the hungry. If our hospitals are too big, too complex, too impersonal to do these small kindnesses for the sick, something is very wrong.