WHAT IS A 'LIBERAL'? A 'LIBERAL' SENATOR ANSWERS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00149R000100810002-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 19, 1998
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: May 6, 1963
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

MAY 6 1963
anitized - Approved For Release: CIA-RDP75-00149R000100810002-3
U. S. News Morld Report
WHAT IS A "LIBERAL"?
A "LIBERAL" SENATOR ANSWERS
CPYRGHT
How does a "liberal" of this day describe
himself? What is his real position on big gov-
ernment, freedom, other issues?
A leading spokesman for the "liberal" point
of view-Senator Frank Church (Dem.), of Idaho
-gives his answers in this article. It was writ-
ten in reply to an article in,the March 25 issue
of "U. S. News & World Report" by Senator
Karl E. Mundt (Rep.), of South Dakota, who
described today's "liberals" as "twentieth-
century tories."
Senator Church says the "antiliberals" mis-
represent the "liberal" view, as part of a
"well-oiled political spook show."
by Senator Frank Church, Democrat, of Idaho
Webster says that "liberal" means "not narrow or con- destroy free enterprise and undermine the liberties of the
tracted in mind; broad-minded. Not bound by authority, people.
orthodox tenets
or established f
,
orms in political or religious
philosophy; independent in opinion; not conservative."
Webster defines "conservative" as "tending or disposed to
maintain existing institutions or views; opposed to change or
innovation."
This seems clear enough. But American politics has been
ffli
d
a
cte
of late with a rash of amateur lexicographers. They call
themselves "conservatives," and they are bent upon redefining
liberalism, to cast it in the villain's role for their well-oiled
political spook show, now on the road from coast to coast.
A
I li
s
sten to their speeches, and
read the polemics which they com-
mit to the public print, this is what
they seem to be saying liberalism
has come to mean:
The do-gooders are at it again.
They want the Federal Government
to act as wet nurse for the whole
population, from the cradle to the
grave, insuring that every want is
uniformly satisfied, and that the
shiftless, the improvident, and the
lazy are taken care of at the expense
of the steady, the foresighted and
the energetic.
They are extracting, through
ever-higher taxes, the good citizens'
hard-earned money, and they are
doling it out to bad citizens. In the
process, the Government has be-
come insolvent, the nation has been
brought to the brink of bankruptcy,
and a monstrous bureaucracy has
arisen which engulfs Congress and
stretches its tentacles around the 50
States, slowly squeezing them to
death. This bureaucracy is dedi-
Now, there is little that can be said to those who believe in
this nightmare definition of liberalism. But for the benefit of
those who would rather pull the sheets off hobgoblins than
quail before them, let's take a look at some facts.
To begin, what accounts for the big Government we have
in Washington today, and for the relatively high level of
federal taxation needed to support it? The federal budget
once eviuent. big Government on the Potomac is chiefly
the product of the tike,
not of the welfare state whic "rlitr-
rme
orces, and the grand total
MR. Gated to socialism, determined to CHURCH: "Big Government is the product accounts for a sta erin 80 rer
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U. S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT, May 6, 1963
117
et are accused of ` fostering.
More than half the total budget
goes directly to the armed forces.
But, before I am accused of tell-
ing only half the story, let's turn
the federal tax dollar over and have
a look at the nonmilitary side. Sur-
prisingly enough, most of the spend-
ing once again relates to warfare
requirements, past and prospec-
tive, unt to welfare 'rrograms. Our
space technology, Atomic Energy
and 1,r1#yal-1Dtelligcnce
agencies
4
are all directly linked to our na-
tional security. The swollen costs
of diplomacy and foreign aid, in-
cluding military assistance to our
allies, also relate to the security
needs of the United States.
Add these, along with the con-
tinuing cost of our ii&volvement in
past wars, veterans' benefits and in-
terest payments on the war debt,
to what we spend each year on the
a
d f
 CPYRGHT
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U. S. New
? . . "Government role has expanded to protect public interest"
is these tremendous expenditures which we have had to
sustain almost without letup for almost 20 years that mainly
account for the big Government in Washington today.
Would the antiliberals apply the meat ax to these ex-
penditures? On the contrary, a recent analysis shows that
new or expanded military programs generally supported by
"conservatives" could add 6 to 10 billion dollars to the "major
national security" sector of the federal budget.
Of your federal tax dollar, the Federal Government spends
only 7 cents on all the welfare programs it supports. The
attack on liberalism, stripped to its essentials, is really a
campaign against these programs, which most "liberals"
favor, and most "conservatives" oppose.
What are these welfare programs? They include federal
grants-in-aid to the States for aged, blind and disabled
citizens, and dependent children; federal grants, usually
given on a matching basis, for public health, hospital con-
struction, control of water and sewage pollution, and food-
and-drug administration.
Also included are all forms of federal aid to education,
federal impact funds, the school-lunch program, vocational re-
habilitation, and the special assistance to schools and students
made available through the National Defense Education
Act-and the costs of administering unemployment compen-
sation, and financing research for medical cures of cancer,
heart disease, infantile paralysis, multiple sclerosis, and a host
of other diseases of mind and body.
Welfare Spending: Relatively Less
On all of these programs combined, we spend a smaller
proportion of our gross national product than we did 25 years
ago.
Let's examine another hobgoblin. What about the mon-
strous federal bureaucracy we hear so much about? Actually,
federal employment no longer keeps pace with the growth
of the country. In 1952, there were 16 federal employes for
every thousand of population. By 1958, this number had
dropped to 14, and it will be 13 in fiscal 1964. In the decade
from 1952 to 1962, total federal civilian employment fell 3
per cent, while employment by State and local governments
increased by 63 per cent. If "creeping socialism" is measured
by the rising tide of government employes, the sentinels
would do better to station themselves closer to home.
What then of the hobgoblin of fiscal irresponsibility? Right
after World War II, our national debt was nearly 130 per
cent of our gross national product. Today it is just under 50
per cent. In 1947, the national debt per person was $1,900;
today it is $1,600. While the total debt of the Federal Gov-
ernment has increased by 15 per cent since 1947, the aggre-
gate debt of State and- local governments has increased an
astonishing 332 per cent, in the total amount of 56 billion
dollars. Private-business debt has increased, in this same
period, by 271 billion, reflecting the tremendous expansion
in all business activity.
If debt accumulation is the measure of fiscal irresponsi-
bility, as "conservatives" would have us believe, then the
Federal Government, managed by "liberals," is coming off
far better these days than either State and local govern-
ment or private business itself, managed largely by "con-
servatives."
Despite these facts, many nonetheless persist in the notion
that big Government has been concentrated in Washington
by "liberals" intent upon undermining the States, or, worse
still, upon perpetuating themselves in office. These suspi-
cions linger b A' Tt?Ze1d terAyppyrWMgbih W89e :
scope of the Federal Government, in our time, with the
limited role originally assigned to it by the Founding
Fathers, a role fashioned to suit the life and times of a rural
and sparsely populated colonial America.
The men who lived in colonial times could not foresee the
sweeping changes the future held in store for their infant
country. They could not possibly have envisioned how our
lives would be transformed by stampeding science, by mam-
moth industries and by the burgeoning growth and urbaniza-
tion of America.
"We Have Adapted to Changing Needs"
The wonder is how the constitutional system they devised
has managed to survive such a tremendous transformation.
And the answer can only be found in the flexibility with
which we have adapted our system to accommodate the
changing needs of the people.
The Federal Government has grown up with the country,
and its role has expanded in order to protect the public
interest in finding satisfactory solutions for the new problems
thrust upon us by a highly industrialized payroll economy,
dominated by gigantic corporations and equally gigantic labor
unions, and increasingly characterized by the interdepend-
ence which results from congested urban life.
Today, federal agencies regulate the rates which may be
charged by railroads, trucking companies, airlines, electric
and gas utilities, and telephone and telegraph companies.
Others supervise the use of the airways to assure the orderly
transmission of radio and television broadcasts. Still others
see that certain drugs are not dispensed without a prescrip-
tion, and that others are properly labeled, and that the pub-
lic is not cheated by false advertising claims.
All of these regulatory activities are connected in a certain
way with our welfare; none of them presented a problem
for local, State, or national government, when the Federal
Union was first joined.
Can the air waves be usurped without any kind of regula-
tion in the public interest? If not, can the State of New Jersey
stop a broadcast from New York City at the State boundary
line? Can the State of Texas insure that consumers of natural
gas in Illinois are not overcharged? I suggest these questions
answer themselves.
Far from being anxious to extend the range of federal
intervention in the general economy, Congress has actually
been a most reluctant dragon. Fifteen million people stood
in breadlines, in the dark, desperate days of the Great
Depression, before Congress at last realized that our economy
had outgrown effective local control, and required sufficient
national regulation to police the nation's stock exchange, to
stabilize the national banks, and to protect the people
against the total collapse of the nation's business.
Unemployment compensation, Social Security, minimum-
wage-and-hour laws were then made the instruments of
reform, as we began the long climb back to recovery.
Our own history is the basis for my contention that the
Federal Government has grown bigger, assuming a larger
role in the life of the people, not because anyone planned it
that way, not in pursuit of any conspiracy to concentrate
power on the Potomac, not, indeed, because any body of doc-
trine required it, but simply because the country grew and
changed, problems arose which existing machinery could
not solve, and new ways were worked out, usually on a trial-
and-error basis, to meet them.
What I am saying is that we have not been doctrinaire,
Gi'J DP OQ 4eRO:OO1QO8s1 G0i0Z2rme label
 Sanitized - Approved Forg;Fbt4;;OSeITCIA-RDP75-00149R000100810002-3
U. S. News & World Report
. . . "There is no way to recapture" freedom of the old frontier
could be affixed to it, but pragmatic, looking for the solution
most apt to work, whatever it might be.
And I would say that the pragmatic method has served
us well. Indeed, I would go further, and offer the judgment
that it is a key source of strength and viability in the system
we have evolved together for solving the problems of the
twentieth century.
Contrast it, if you will, to the approach to problem
solving in Communist lands. It is there that dogma rules su-
preme. There it is supposed that one formula exists which
offers the correct answer to every question; it is the fixed
and final mold of a perfect society. When new problems
arise, solutions are sought by searching the writings of the
Communist prophets, and if one faction dislikes what an-
other proposes, they attack it by saying that it is not in ac-
cordance with the principles of Marxist-Leninist doctrine.
This strait jacket, since it leaves little room for change and
adjustment, must eventually be torn asunder by the inevi-
table pressures. of new problems that cannot find solution
within the rigid pattern of dogma handed down from an
earlier and much different period.
This is why the best minds in the free world are confident
that time is on our side in the struggle with Communism,
while it is the timid and the troubled among us who seek
the comfort of conformity, and want to solve all problems of
the present by reciting the ritual slogans of the past; who
fear that Communism, being inflexible and disciplined by
dogma, will soon overwhelm us.
Taking the Middle Course
You may accept it as the "liberal" view that neither the
formulas of the radical "left" nor those of the radical "right"
offer us acceptable blueprints for the future. This does not
mean that we lack values, as some have rudely charged; it
means only that we do not claim to be prophetic. We do not
presume to know what the future holds, and so we strive,
from day to day, to keep our society open and free, knowing
that in this way we can continue to apply the same pragmatic
test to the problems of the future as has served us so well in
the past.
This brings us to an examination of the last hobgoblin in
the political spook-show version of liberalism with which I
commenced this discourse, the familiar assertion that the
huge federal octopus is crushing our basic freedom. This
question ought to be paramount in any appraisal of the larger
role the Federal Government has come to play in our society.
Has the expanding activity of the Federal Government
infringed upon the freedom of the individual? If by freedom
one means the bundle of individual rights guaranteed to
each citizen by the Federal Constitution, then there is no
evidence to support the charge.
The whole movement of our history has been in the di-
rection of enlarging the bundle: Slavery has been abolished,
women's suffrage has been won, the many restrictions that
once made voting the privilege of the propertied few have
been steadily sloughed away. Indeed, the complaints I get
about current decisions of the Supreme Court are not to the
effect that the Court is giving too little attention to the rights
of the individual, but too much.
Still, there remains a general uneasiness, which all of us
feel from time to time, that somehow our freedom is being
impaired. Again I suggest this feeling springs from historic
roots. `
disappeared. The social and economic order they knew
and valued was founded on land ownership. They envisioned
a society of freeholders, each producing on the land nearly
everything he and his family needed, and consuming nearly
everything produced. They conceived that the independence,
industry, and self-reliance of these farmer-freeholders, sup-
plemented by a small minority of equally independent
craftsmen and artisans, would yield a maximum of freedom.
In such a society, there was need for only a minimum of
government, which was suspect anyway, owing to the tyranny
of the king. The natural attitude was to hold government
down, permit no interference with freedom of speech and
religion, insure fair and orderly judicial proceedings, keep
the tax collector away -- and all will be well. This early
concept of freedom remains very much a part of our
birthright.
Now, the modern man who works for wages in a factory
or an office, or who tractors a big spread of land on which he
grows only wheat or potatoes, is both more and. less free than
the self-sufficient freeholder of the eighteenth century. Ic
some ways, he is a wheel-within-a-wheel-within-a-wheel,
pulling the same lever on an assembly line, or bearing the
same leather dispatch case, full of papers, which is one of
those status symbols of the "organization man." He has come
to need many things which his ancestors didn't even know
about, and couldn't possibly have imagined. Ile is hemmed
in by laws and regulations, and he pays taxes.
In exchange, his life is longer, fuller, and easier. He is
literate, and if he avails himself of the opportunity, he may
know the pleasures of good books, good music and good
drama. He has leisure time for travel and recreation, and
he can readily know much about what goes on in the big
world around him. If he is taken sick, there are doctors,
nurses, and well-equipped hospitals to care for him.
Wherever he may live, he can easily stay in touch with
his parents or grandparents, children or grandchildren. And
he is conscious, if he ever stops to think about it, that his
fellow men, whether they are engaged in chipping away at
the malignant mysteries of cancer, or giving penicillin to
the diseased children of Africa, or probing the alien darkness
of outer space, are being sustained in part by the product of
his labor.
"A Time of Peril and of Promise"
Who is to say whether freedom has been gained or lost
through the upheaval of science and industry that has so
changed the character of our lives? The form of the free life
known to the old frontier is disappearing, and there is no
way to recapture it. Of this, I am sure. We stand upon what
President Kennedy has chosen to describe as a few Frontier.
It is a time of peril and of promise for the human race.
Science has given us the tools to either cinderize the earth
in the witchfire of nuclear war, or make of it man's footstool
to the stars.
God only knows what our fate is to be. But on this earth,
lie has left our destiny in our hands. We can best preparc
for it by facing the future, by recognizing that the "liberal"
programs, as we know them today, have been fashioned by
the effort of free men to regulate their affairs in response to
the needs of the changing times.
Let the process continue, for it cannot be stopped. And let
us pray that it will be directed, in the future as it has in
the past, by unbigoted and pragmatic men, who have no
The ideal of freedom which motivated the founders of our fear of hobgoblins, and who are dedicated to the everlasting
Republic was based upon a way of life that has long since quest of keeping our society open and free. [END]
U. S. NEWS & WORLD ltE 0R1tMzed 1- 963 Approved For Release : CIA-RDP75-00149R000100810002-3119