Conversation 702-006

Transcript (AI-Generated)

This transcript was generated automatically by AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Do not cite this transcript as authoritative. Consult the Finding Aid above for verified information.

I still have to answer my own question, that a majority of the people in this country

across the country.

It isn't a very big majority, but maybe it's about 55%.

55% of the people on a critical issue of national events, national honor, law, order, justice, etc., will come out on the right side.

In other words, that out through the heartland,

And there's a lot of hard money in Michigan and New York and other states that we do not consider to be so-called conservative.

And I'm speaking of conservatism in the same sense that you speak of it, the majority of it.

But I think the great danger in America, the weakness in America, if I may say so, is in its leader class.

Its leader class.

It is difficult to find businessmen, educators, opinionators, liberal politicians,

who will stand for it and fight for it.

Take the Senate.

The Senate at the present time is an interesting one.

And the House of Representatives is true.

But its strength is

It is rapidly dying off the top, and that is the main strength of the old southern conservatives.

The old chairman is dying, Russell is dead, Stennis is very old, etc.

And so what is it going to be?

What is it going to replace him?

and you look at the Republicans in the North, well, now and then you've got a stand-up guy, but some of that is just, you know, trying to characterize what's your view about this.

What about the American leader class?

Do you think, do you think there's any hope for it?

Well, every class has seen the decay of the continuity of the family and the class.

It's something T.S.

Eliot was going to demonstrate.

It's not in our time.

And I'm not speaking in compliment.

We'll look at Eliot today, but I forgot to look at the character of him.

Did you do that?

I've got a long section of it.

I've got a section of it.

I'm happy with it.

I think the reason, because I see it, the family's my own sort.

My father was an instrument player.

My father was a street player.

And the one who had such a family was a student with a number of them.

The families in such a class, the number of families in that class, had to pay a family cultural accountability going back generations and so on.

And the real education is carried out in the family.

Okay, the education is carried out in the family.

That's right.

We got a lot of them in church.

And also, I must say, we got some in school.

I don't see that my kids have any kids.

In the school education itself, a good candidate is possible only because the children there were interested because they came in families that had an interest in learning.

some kind of continental culture.

Well, that is breaking up and saying, they've got more people than Detroit.

They're breaking down because there's too much money.

There's too much idols of lack of genuine culture.

All breaking up at once.

You can see it all around.

Television, we've much of a break with technology.

Everyone has a problem with television culture.

How's it possible you're running a school nowadays and the children spend a lot more time watching television than they do?

I think television is a matter of fact in terms of education.

People say it could be a great educational tool, I hope so.

But I can certainly say that television at the present time is a destroyer of family life.

And I'm going to sound extremely reactionary here.

Because basically,

Unless it's something you really want to see, like things anybody wants to see, like the China war, or the moon, or a sports event, or something like that.

My God, if television knew you better off reading this paper, you'd get a lot faster.

That, in terms of television fare, it is unbelievably bad.

But you agree?

Oh, yes.

Terrible?

Terrible.

But if you change the whole psychology of the child, he becomes very brave.

He wants constant change.

Right, right.

Sensation.

Yeah, sensation.

That's right.

No things against any habits of reflection.

And you changed all of it.

Well, exercise pressure, that works, but that's a little bit slow.

I think if you can say it would be .

Yeah.

But, oh, I see the same thing on the cost of work.

Now, we'll have to fully interact with our own school, our own house, in order to get a really decent school.

It's still a drop-in school, which is still good.

It's still overrun.

It's still a well-planned, small, very clean drop-in school.

It's still going.

How long?

We'll know those questions.

Forbidden in the aid of constitutional members of Michigan now.

Aren't you part of that?

Oh, yes, all of it.

So am I. I've got to make a speech as a matter of fact.

There's people that don't get to it.

I've got school administrators and I'm going to reiterate myself with my support generally.

That's a little bit of tax.

This is a small aid, but it will help some.

It's not a tax credit.

But I think in the provincial schools, if I can get two million dollars for children,

They aren't long for this world unless we start helping them.

So I'm going to pass it down.

I'm going to send that faster than they have to because they're now obsessed with the idea of their own death.

We're doomed.

And they talk about it.

They talk about it all the time.

So they're giving up their passion.

They have to.

They say, well, it's just a question.

We'd be out in five years anyway, so let's do it today.

And that's a great recommendation.

Well, that's interesting.

But you said you're here.

Well, I don't know about that.

I don't know.

But even there, even though it's a good school, still television culture comes in from the other children.

The other children, most of them are very, very not very interested in what's going on.

They're constantly full of television slogans and so on.

So even that has been worked too well.

Nobody has to take them out and see how it works.

They have to take them back home and carry on with school at home, where they're the only place in the county where it's just not submerged in television culture.

So the library club only got one household in the county.

which is still carrying on in anything like the litigation.

Do you think anything can be done at the governmental level?

You know, everybody talks about the moral leadership of the president and all that sort of stuff.

But, uh, it's terribly difficult to, uh, what's done is, uh, it's very, very difficult.

They don't want presidents to preach to them.

I do.

I mean, these days, uh, I mean, there was a time when D.R.

talked about the presidency being bulletproof and all that.

And to a certain extent, you can get up in a rank of people about drugs or some other subject, but when you finally come down to it,

with the pounding they get, the media, night after night after night on the television, you know, a little reading they do, I mean, occasionally here.

You do, you try, you try.

You gotta stand for the right things as much as you possibly can and fight against the wrong things.

But you're, let me ask you, you're not pessimistic about the future.

Well, you are.

My thoughts are yours.

Probably, we are in a decadent age, but in all worlds, all great states are decadent in some degree and fashion.

And one of them looks at the perception of history, after all, there are ages and segments, and then there's recovery.

If you look at the history of the Byzantine Empire, you'll find this.

You should take something out of shop to do it.

Add to the appearance, perhaps, of a new religion, but a revival of religious understanding.

I agree.

You need that, don't you?

The politics can help in a sense to refrain from doing bad things.

But mostly from correcting policies that have been ruined.

So what about your new old highway building?

You've done so much terrible mischief.

You can do it on the slope.

Well, we're getting after a few things.

Some of them, perhaps, are doubtful.

And so, particularly in that existence area, people would say that it may be going in the wrong direction.

But any of that new work requirement is right.

But you come down to it.

A forestry integration, for example, housing.

It's ridiculous.

If you can't force people to live together, you don't want to live together.

My argument is that no government aid should be provided to any community that should be community choice that doesn't want it.

And no government aid, of course, should be provided to any housing project that, which discriminates.

So that, that is for the community.

And the community should decide it.

But the whole urban renewal thing, I mean, it's been such a disaster.

Martin Anderson, of course, did a classical piano, and he still is.

I mean, he's helping us this year, but that was a beautiful boat, I think, and tore it to pieces.

But we've had to fight it because you see the Congress, and they see these things.

They see all these wonderful abilities.

Let me ask you one other thing.

I know you're of great interest in talking about the

farms, you see, and all the other things.

What about the environment?

Is that, is the kit going too far?

No, probably not far enough.

How do you feel about the environmental issues?

How do you just deal with that?

It's immensely important.

We haven't done this as a means or a method.

And if we went to demand magical results at once, I would not at all be willing to bear the sacrifice.

It costs a lot, yes.

And playing the physical sacrifice and saying that.

In my house, we didn't have any electrolytes at all 20 years ago.

We didn't have any except downstairs.

12 years ago.

Well, now everybody in the county has big freezers and all kinds of other things, air conditioners and so on.

Well, if you're going to save the environment in the county, you're going to have to go back to kerosene land, which is not the wrong way, but most of the way you're going to have to get rid of these freezers.

It might not be too bad.

It'd be a very good thing, I'm sure.

It'd be good for the people, for their character, the kind of work they do in those offices.

If you front them with it, they'd say, fine, we're going to, in the ecology, we're going to take away your freezer.

Or you're going to start, stop selling so many automobiles.

Yes, yes.

So we won't have to build more superhighways and all of that stuff.

We're going to have to have some more urban.

Yeah.

And some of Junefield struck it a bit, but do you think the environmental case is one of them?

That's a good outlook for people, you could say.

As I said, the real questions before us are the restoration of moral understanding and the recovery of roots.

And the ecology, if you have any questions, those are the big things we can come to.

I think the roots are more important than the environment.

I think that it will come.

But when we talk about the recovery of roots,

See, I get back, what do you feel about those in your class?

Do you share my concern about them?

Do you know?

Yes.

And I've just seen the .

And so you agree with me about the business community as well as others?

Yes, as most of us.

Or is that a surprise?

When you say it's the Main Street people, you still have some of them.

Main Street, oh, obviously the Main Street, the Rotarians, and the Gaitwanians, and the rest, you know.

They're more of a push to the wall.

They're fewer every year.

That's right.

The big chain stores, they go there.

They're close to folks.

Yes.

I don't know, even though you're a mainstream lawyer or doctor or whatever he is, he's a lot better than the Park Avenue one.

You know, in terms of believing in something.

That's the difference.

You think, one of the things, I'll say a little bit, I've had people, far more experiences than I have,

If one looks at, say, the men of great wealth who have, say, political imagination and moral concern and so on, they're very few.

I've known some, some of those I've known to death.

If one were to look around today, that's obviously what that means.

We won't have any friends.

We won't actually have a bloody body and so on.

Still, we're starting to come to those who have real imagination at the same time.

Well, you have someone like Anthony Salazar, right?

People like that who will read books about money and interest and so on.

But they're very few, very, very few.

What would you really come down to it?

Most of them are men who set up foundations and then they hire bright young guys who work in foundations and gals.

And those people completely corrupt and distort everything and all that they rebuilt.

That's what's happened to the Ford Foundation.

Pretty good examples.

I knew Henry Ford when I was a young man.

And what he was really interested in, so far as I've seen, was the historic preservation.

And that's when, of course, I was told that they'd like to use it for the Greenville Village.

Well, only when he boarded the project, which he would have boarded.

Yeah.

And what happened was he would agree and he wouldn't have killed him because of that.