The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

WHEN the United States Supreme Court in 1954 called for public school integration “with all deliberate speed,” the nine justices knew that many years would have to pass before their unanimous decision would be honored throughout the South and the border states as the law of the land. They expected, however, that progress toward that goal would be continuous, beginning in the border states and in the areas of the Old South where the Negro proportion of the population is relatively small and where the white majority could be expected to accept integration without necessarily agreeing with it.

The subsequent years of battle over the issue proved this thesis correct in the border states. Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, all have moved forward in line with the court’s rulings on schools and on other matters related to integration. And there have been nibblings at the edge of the problem, in part, even in the Old South and in Arkansas before Governor Faubus defied the court and the federal government.

The Arkansas case, coupled with Senator Byrd’s edict of “massive resistance” in Virginia, served to remind many of us of the complex nature of the federal-state relationship. However supreme as the law of the land is the mandate of the nation’s highest court, the states through their governors, especially when backed by their legislatures, retain a meaningful measure of power even in this day of centralized authority.

But the maneuverings as schools opened — or were shut — this fall brought to public notice another fact of American government: the supremacy of the state over all the local subdivisions of government within its boundaries: city, county, and school boards. Further integration in Texas schools, for example, has been blocked by a new state law requiring approval by public referendum of any local acceptance of integration.

The pressure for local option

In Virginia the closing of public schools by the governor has produced a new issue: continued public school education with some integration or no public education at all.

If one looks at a map of the South divided into counties (or school districts, which generally follow county lines) it is apparent that the problem of integration, in local terms, varies greatly. In the case of Virginia, for example, there is a tier of counties between the Blue Ridge and the West Virginia-Kentucky border in almost all of which Negroes make up less than 10 per cent of the population, in some cases only one or 2 per cent.

To the cast of the Blue Ridge is an adjoining tier of counties in which the Negroes number from 11 to 30 per cent, and to the east of that section is the Virginia portion of the black belt, which curves far south into Georgia and Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, where the Negroes constitute a third and in many counties a majority of the school population.

Warren and Arlington counties in Virginia aec in the less-than-10 per cent group while Norfolk and Charlottesville are in the 11 to 30 per cent category. These are the counties with school boards under federal court order to accept Negro pupils in hitherto all-white schools, and in each of these counties there are many whites who clearly prefer to accept some integration rather than to close down the schools. But Governor Almond, in following the Byrd edict of massive resistance, had been following the lead of the whites in the black belt.

What has begun to happen is exactly what it appears the Supreme Court hoped would happen: local pressures in areas where the problem is less critical because of small Negro populations are trying to obtain the right to exercise local option. In Charlottesville, for example, a group of parents created a committee for public education to keep the schools open.

Almond versus Byrd

Governor Almond, while as much a personal believer in segregation as Senator Byrd, has not been immune to this new pressure for local option. In fact, as the state’s attorney general prior to his election as governor, Almond and the present attorney general, then a state senator, were among the framers and supporters of what was known as the Gray Plan. In essence, that was a plan for local option which the Byrd machine supported at the time, and it won a big majority vote at a statewide referendum. But it was junked as Byrd’s attitude hardened into a determination that the state should not permit any county or school board to make its own decisions if faced by court orders to integrate.

After the Supreme Court this year unanimously called for continued integration in Little Rock, Almond took an extraordinary step. By agreement he had his attorney general file a suit in the state supreme court to test the constitutionality of the school-closing law which he had just invoked to close the Warren County high school. The case also will test the state law which cuts off state funds to desegregated schools.

There is good reason to believe that Almond’s strategy is this: he privately accepts as inevitable a gradual movement toward integration, notwithstanding Byrd, whom he hopes to succeed in the U.S. Senate. He deplores having to close the schools as required by state law jammed through in response to Byrd’s edict. He knows that the two laws he has now questioned in the state courts would be challenged in the federal courts by the NAACP and probably would be found unconstitutional in due course.

But Governor Almond knows that the politically powerful hard core of segregationists in Virginia’s black belt does not respect the Supreme Court, to put it mildly. Hence, Almond reasons, if the state’s own highest court declares the school-closing and fund cutoff laws unconstitutional in view of public school provisions in Virginia’s own constitution, the extremists will have to accept some measure of local option.

Almond is not, of course, saying anything like this publicly. But he knows that if the state court knocks out these two key parts of the state’s massive resistance package the other parts become meaningless, and he will have publicly demonstrated that he has done everything in his power to continue state-wide segregation by all legal means. For Almond is not a Faubus, and Virginia, whatever else one may say about the Old Dominion and the Byrd machine, is temperamentally opposed to violence of the Little Rock kind.

If Virginia’s massive resistance is broken in favor of local option, it certainly would sustain and encourage the degree of local option now being exercised in North Carolina. It would offer a way out for harassed school boards in other states as they inevitably face the dilemma of obeying state closing laws or federal court action.

Economic aid in the Middle East

In the Middle East, the Arab-sponsored plan for the United Nations to mitigate the struggle between Nasser and his foes in Lebanon and Jordan gave the United States a breathing spell and a new opportunity. The opportunity lies in the economic field, where the critical issue is whether the United States will follow through on the exceptionally well-stated and well-received economic proposals put forward at the United Nations by President Eisenhower.

Fundamentally, as one of Dulles’ closest friends has put it, the secretary’s greatest mistake in the Middle East has been to reject the idea that Arab nationalism has meaning per se, apart from the successful efforts of the Kremlin to use it against the West. This attitude has been behind the whole scries of American policy mistakes: the acceptance of Iraq into a Baghdad Pact; the withdrawal of our offer of aid in building the Aswan Dam, which led Nasser to nationalize the Suez Canal; financial and other restrictions forced on Egypt by Washington.

Now it is evident that Nasser is top dog in the Middle East. His influence is spreading across North Africa and south into black Africa. The United States has a choice: try to live with Nasser and Nasserism or try to build up opposition to him in the new Iraqi regime, in the Sudan, in Tunisia and Morocco. The latter effort, many Middle East students are convinced, would be doomed to failure. Trying to come to terms with Nasser, however, is risky. It would further enhance his power and further diminish Western power where it does remain in the area.

An Arab development fund

But there is one hopeful possibility, if the United States will seize it. That is to push, not too openly but through the United Nations, the World Bank, and the Arab League’s revitalized Development Bank, for an Arab economic development program on so large a scale that it could turn Nasser’s energies from a negative policy of opposition to the constructive one of doing something for his poverty-stricken masses. The key is oil and oil revenues. Nasser already has begun to blackmail, to put it bluntly, the Arab leaders in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq, who receive huge revenues. The evidence, in fact, is that Nasser is now likely to pause in his political efforts to concentrate on economic measures, for he knows that he must get his hands on oil revenues if his dream of Pan-Arabism is to succeed.

The West can encourage Nasser’s oil-rich Arab friends to put money into an Arab development scheme, or it can buck this trend and risk nationalization of the oil companies. A number of American officials as well as some of the key American oil industry executives are alive to this problem and quite willing to see revenue diverted to Arab development. So far, however, Dulles’ inclination is to wait and see what the Arabs themselves do.

The most critical point is Kuwait, the tiny Persian Gulf sheikdom whose Sheik is under British protection. This year the Sheik is estimated as likely to receive some $375 million in revenue for his 50 per cent cut of the profits, and the trend is upward. By 1966, some oil experts estimate, the Sheik will be receiving something like $750 million a year. So far he has been dividing his income one third for his own use, one third for schools, public works, and other public projects in his sheikdom, and one third for investment, chiefly in British treasury bonds. Those investments are reputed to be the largest single source of new sterling capital for the United Kingdom.

It would be simple for the Sheik to buy Arab development bonds with at least part of his investment money, and this is what Nasser has been negotiating with the Sheik of Kuwait, according to reports reaching Washington. The impact on Britain is not easy to estimate, but Washington officials consider that it would be preferable to finance the Arab scheme this way, with the United States helping the British directly if necessary. It also is argued that Britain would get a lot of export business from the Arab development agency, which would go far to make up the loss of the Sheik’s investments.

Saudi Arabia and Iraq need their revenues for public works at home but can spare a percentage for general Arab development. And the American and British oil firms, according to industry sources, are prepared to match the oil-rich government contributions to the Arab Bank. This would be a form of insurance for the continuation of their concessions, and it would help to maintain the vital supply of Middle East oil for Western Europe without recourse to dollar oil from the Western Hemisphere.

Mood of the Capital

Louis H. Bean, the election forecaster who won fame by predicting a Truman victory in 1948, estimates that the 8.2 per cent drop this year in the Maine GOP congressional vote will produce something close to sixty new Democratic congressmen in November.

The real question, as Washington sees it on the eve of the election, is not whether the Democrats will win both Houses of Congress but whether they will win so heavily as to upset the North-South, liberal-conservative balance within the party in Congress. A sweep would give the Northern and Western liberal wing clear control within the Democratic Party, which would enable it to challenge the conservative Southern Democratic-Republican coalition. Strong liberal control of Congress would encourage nomination of a liberal for President with the heavy risk of a North-South party split.