CRISIS IN LAW AND ORDER
The week following the April riots in Washington, D. C., I made a visit to our nation’s capital. The newspapers said the troops had been removed and the city had “returned to normal.” Yet, I was unable to persuade any taxi driver to drive me through the riot area so I could view for myself the devastation we all had seen on our TV screens. The taxi drivers absolutely refused to drive through the riot areas – even in broad daylight – because they were afraid of having a rock thrown through their windshield – or worse.
If this is “normal” in our nation’s capital, the American people have had enough! Only a complete housecleaning in Washington and the election of Republicans can do the job. The present Administration is obviously incapable of solving urban problems all over the country when it cannot even make the streets of our nation’s capital safe from criminals.
Twenty-three years ago, I lived and worked in Washington, D. C. My office was just a block from the recent riot area. I walked to and from my job every day and was never afraid. Now I am told it is not safe to drive through that area in a taxi in broad daylight.
The Democrats are fond of challenging freedom-lovers to “name one freedom we have lost under the New Deal-Fair Deal-New Frontier-Great Society.” There is now an undisputed answer to that challenge. We have lost the freedom to walk in the big cities of our country. Our nation’s capital – once the showplace of the world – is now more dangerous than the Vietnam jungle.
A gold mine of important information on law and order is contained in the recently-published Hearings on Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Government Operations Committee, November 1967, Parts 1, 2 and 3. This remarkable report is available from Senator John L. McClellan, Senate Office Building, Washington, D. C.
Part I contains a three-page chart which gives a graphic description of the major riots in the United States during 1965, 1966 and 1967. The first conclusion that strikes the reader is the a
rapid escalation of riots and civil disorder. There were four times as many riots in 1966 as in 1965, and almost four times as many riots in 1967 as in 1966. Based on this acceleration, what can we expect in 1968? We have already started at a frightening pace. Here are the annual
figures:
1965 ……………………….. 5 riots
1966 ……………………….. 20 riots
1967 ……………………….. 76 riots
1968 (first 4 months only) ……… 125 riots
NEW GOVERNMENT REPORT
Now let us examine the cold statistics on these riots which record some of the hot suffering, costly damage, and bloody viciousness. The figures below are for 1965, 1966, and 1967, but do not include 1968.
Number of riots ………………. 101
Law officers killed …… ………. 12
Law officers injured ……… 1,199
Civilians killed …………………. 118
Civilians injured ……… …… 2,424
Cases of arson ……… …….. 7,985
Number of cities in which
rioters interfered with firemen ….. 66
Number of cities in which
rioters included snipers ………… 38
Estimated loss of property …. $21.0,600,000.00
Estimated economic loss …. $504,200,000.00
The figures on sniping, vicious harassment of firemen, and the fantastic number of cases of arson, give the lie to the wooly-minded people who stubbornly refuse to believe the riots were planned by professional revolutionaries.
CRIME WITHOUT PUNISHMENT
Now comes the most shocking part of the statistics — and the reason why riots and crime are sure to get worse in the months ahead:
Number of arrests ………………. 28,932
Number of convictions … …….. 5,434
In other words, a rioter has less than one chance out of five of being convicted. With odds so favorable to criminals, the temptation to loot whiskey, gun, clothing, and television stores is irresistable.
The percentage of convictions in the two worst riots during 1967 is even more shocking:
DETROIT NEWARK
Number of arrests …………. 7,231 1,462
Number of convictions ……. 539 8
The 1968 percentage of convictions is likely to be even smaller. Instead of enforcing the law, the Justice Department is spending its time asking judges to release rioters scot-free or give them one-day suspended sentences, and asking the newspapers to print a minimum amount of news and facts about riots and civil disorders in order to keep the voters from realizing how bad the
situation is.
DEPRIVED?
It is often said that riots are caused by misery, deprivation, and hopelessness in the “ghettos.” Consider these facts.
The 1,800 prisoners arrested in Chicago in the April 1968 riots were found to be carrying $85,000 in cash on their persons. Many adult looters carried $300 to $400 each, and the average teenage looter had $100 in cash. One looter had $563 in his possession when arrested. The warden said: “Never have I seen such rich prisoners. I thought we had Sam Giancana and a few wealthy members of the mob back in jail.”
Where did this money come from? Was it outside money, or Communist money, brought in to promote riot action? Was it stolen? No one seems to know.
Governor Otto Kerner, chairman of the troublemaking Kerner-Lindsay report which blamed all our troubles on “white racism,” has displayed no interest in the answers to these questions. He did not even interrupt his vacation in Florida in order to return to his job during the Chicago riots, the worst law-and-order crisis in the history of Illinois.
THE SOLUTION
The only solution to the present rise in crime and riots is to elect to office this November public officials who will enforce the law. This year, thousands of local, county, state and national candidates are soliciting your vote: sheriffs, prosecuting attorneys, state’s attorneys, judges, county commissioners, school board members, attorney generals, governors, Congressmen, etc. Make sure they know – in language a candidate can understand – that you are voting only for candidates who will restore law and order to our communities and inside our schools. (The most shocking recent incidents have been the race riots, knifings, and firebomb throwings that have gone on imide integrated public high schools.)
Tell your candidates that courageous law enforcement will be supported by the public. The “get tough” policy of Miami’s police chief, with use of shotguns and police dogs, has caused crime in that city to drop by two-thirds and is fully supported by Negroes there. Mayor Daley’s “shoot to kill” order brought a 15-to-l favorable response from Chicagoans and caused Dick Gregory, within hours, to cancel his planned demonstration at the Democratic National Convention this summer.
The voters must act now, before November, if they want to be safe — not sorry.
ROCKEFELLER’S STRATEGY
The day that Nelson Rockefeller announced his active candidacy for the presidency ( April 30) Eric Sevareid editorialized on the Walter Cronkite CBS-TV show. Noting that Richard Nixon is way out in front in the race for Delegates to the Republican National Convention, Sevareid said that Rockefeller’s strategy is based on the assumption that many of Nixon’s Delegates are made of “soft glue and can become unstuck.”
Are YOUR Delegates made of “soft glue”?
Do YOUR Delegates have a wishbone where a backbone ought to be?
It is YOUR responsibility at the local level to know how YOU are going to be represented at the Republican National Convention in Miami in August. This is the immediate task of all conservative Republicans. This is what we mean when we say “all politics is local.” YOU — at the local level — have the responsibility for the integrity, loyalty, and reliable Republicanism of the Delegates who represent you in Miami.
Will you be present when your precinct, county, and state Republican conventions are held? Have you made your plans and rallied conservatives to stop the liberal steamroller and their publicity blitz? This effort is our number-one objective between now and August.
ROCKY’S VIEWS ON VIETNAM
The following is an exact quotation from Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s press conference of March 21, 1968, as transcribed from both the Huntley-Brinkley and Walter Cronkite TV shows:
REPORTER’S QUESTION: “Governor Rockefeller, would you please outline your views on Vietnam?”
ROCKEFELLER: “My position is very simple. . .. I think that our actions are not completely relevant to the realities of the magnitude of the complexities of the problem we face there.”
TALE OF SURVIVAL
EAGLES RIDE STORMS LESSER BIRDS FEAR
By Norman Vincent Peale
Storms bring out eagles; little birds take to cover. Little men try to run from storms and some times are smashed by them. But big men ride storms to better things.
When things get too soft, it may seem just fine but all the time you re softening. And then trouble begins. Ever hear of the Penobscot sea gulls from down-East in Maine? They live in rocky craigs of Penobscot Bay and are said to be the most beautiful sea gulls in the world. The aerodynamics of their flight — sideslipping and wheeling downwind — is something to behold. And they have always been pretty smart gulls. They teach their young to forage their own food and be strong self-reliant sea gulls like their forefather. They really are tough birds.
It seems that every winter these sea gulls go to Florida for food. According to the story I heard, a squall once struck the Penobscot gulls in migration forcing them off course and down on Conch Island near St. Augustine. There they were made welcome by hospitable southern sea
gulls.
* * *
NEXT MORNING the visitors from Maine expected to be invited to their hosts’ fishing grounds where they could test their mettle in the struggle for food. But the native sea gulls didn’t move. Instead they just sat around indolently waiting. Then presently calling their northern visitors
to join them, they flapped into the air and came down a hundred yards away around a fleet of shrimp boats where they gorged themselves on scraps of fish and shrimp thrown overboard.
The down-East gulls were amazed and delighted. Never had they known anything like this. Imagine it! Food without work! It appealed to that laziness which apparently is in birds same as in men. When summer came the flock of northern sea gulls did not fly back to Maine but sat indolently on Conch Island and grew fat, almost too fat to fly.
Then the fishing fleet went away and the softened up gulls did not know what to do. They began to have it real rough. The young had not been taught to seek and struggle for their own food. Their plaintive cries brought no help and many died of starvation.
Well, it seems that men, no less than sea gulls, need to grapple with difficulties to condition them for survival in this world. A really smart person never gets to a point where he is unwilling to go out and struggle. If you are having rough going don’t whine and whimper. Instead cultivate the philosophy of difficulty: every difficulty contains some inherent good you can utilize to move forward.
At luncheon with· half a dozen men our conversation turned on the attitude that hardship is a bad thing. One man was asked to what he credited his success. “Poverty,” he replied, “poverty was and still is my motivation. My father was a drunk, a kind-hearted lovable father but a drunk. We literally had nothing – lived in a shack and my mother took in washing. I can see her yet over
those old-fashioned steaming tubs working herself to death. We kids wore hand-me-downs. I hated poverty like nobody’s business. So I got going and worked my way out of it. I took my mother out of it too. But I’m still running scared from poverty.”
Others around the table, likewise, credited hardship, struggle and tough conditions for what they had become. “But you are all rich men. What about your own kids?” I asked.
* * *
THE ANSWERS ran like this: “They’ve got it worse than we had it because they have too much.” “Yeah,” chimed in another “if we don’t watch out they’ll become a bunch of hippies.” “It’s tough on character to have it too good,” said another.
It would be unwise to forget the truth that storms bring out eagles – little birds take to cover; and that every child of God has eagle characteristics in him. Storms help him to grow big wings.
My friend George Cullum, prominent construction executive in water and drainage lines in Dallas, has a formula for himself and his men: “When the job gets rough get as rough as the job. When the rock gets hard get as hard as the rock.”
Life can be pretty tough, really tough. But something was built in human nature that is tougher still. Frank Leahy, famed Notre Dame coach, wrote a legend on the locker room wall for his football players: “When the going gets tough, let the tough get going.”
* * *
This beautiful article is reprinted through the courtesy of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and Publishers-Hall Syndicate.
