When it became plain that “Faces of War,” a television program scheduled to commemorate Veterans’ Day, was intended to be a vehicle for pacifist indoctrination, the New York Public Library, which had contributed fifteen hundred dollars toward its production, withdrew as a sponsor. “In sensitive areas,” President Morris Hadley pronounced, “it is wisest for the library not to take a position.” Could it be that public opinion is beginning to think of war as thinkable?
“The sinner man he gambled, he gambled and fell,” goes the old spiritual, and that’s what seems to have happened to the Republican Party in the elections. The GOP gambled that the Negro would vote for the Party of civil rights legislation, for the President who sent troops into Little Rock. But there’s no evidence that this happened in New York or in New Jersey. And in Virginia, the upsurge in Republican Negro votes was more than offset by the Republicans who voted for “massive resistance” and a Democratic Governor. But having made the gamble, the Republicans are stuck with it. The GOP has destroyed itself in the South, and in chasing the skittish Negro vote in the North it is forced into the position where it must outpromise the Northern Liberals up and down the line. Like the “sinner man,” the Modern Republican is finding that though “he wanted to go to Heaven, he had to go to Hell.”
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