Staffing Freedom

An Appeal by Senator Joseph S. Clark

What kind of country do we Americans want? What kind of universe do we wish to live in?

Survival in freedom with a reasonable chance for happiness would be the answer for most of us. I think of a creative country in which there is respect for the brotherhood of man.

It is only when we start discussing policies, programs, and procedures that we get into trouble. My concern is with people, not methods. How can we find, train, and hold in the right jobs people needed to create what Walter Lippmann calls the “ good society”?

Today we have no national personnel policy or plan. We do not try to steer our best young people into the careers where their brains are needed. We leave the choice to chance and the market place. We hope that a sense of dedication will prove more compelling than the dollar reward.

Not only are we short of teachers; too many of those we have are not really good enough. We have plenty of politicians, but many of them are hardly worth the powder to blow them away.

Does it really make sense to siphon our ability into color television, the manufacture and sale of soft drinks, cigarettes, whisky, and cosmetics, and the advertising of these commodities? Hasn’t the time come to start thinking about how to put American capabilities into jobs where they can best advance American national interests?

In 1942, Military Occupation Specialty (MOS) determined where one served “the cause of freedom.” The planners in the Pentagon decided the necessary qualifications of each G.I. and each officer required to man our armed services. That was a hot war, and this one is cold. Compulsion would not work today; but persuasion might.

They plan well in Russia. There someone decides where little Ivan is going to work. If, at the age of eleven, he seems unresponsive, he goes back to the collective farm. If he shows promise, his education is continued at state expense through technical school and the university. Education and incentives for different occupations are adjusted to meet the personnel needs required by the current Five or Seven Year Plan.

In Continental Europe and Great Britain, educational and occupational planning is far ahead of our chaotic American hit or miss.

Would we lose our sacred freedoms if we tried by persuasion to get what others achieve by compulsion? I think not. Is it so difficult to inventory our personnel requirements? Ewan Clague, the United States Commissioner of Labor Statistics, tells us that the job is already well begun. He has published a handbook estimating the prospects in six hundred different occupations.

Surely wise men and women can set tentative priorities among these occupations. A White House conference on national personnel requirements would do more than start people thinking; it could determine empirically how many welltrained people we are likely to need in the next thirty years to achieve our national goals.

The next question is, How can we use both the carrot and the stick to get these young people trained and on their way to where they are needed? How can we get more and better teachers, scientists, priests, politicians, rabbis, ministers, musicians, poets, and social workers? To get them we will have to settle for fewer brewers, night-club proprietors, and lobbyists.

Perhaps our national sense of values needs a little adjusting. Perhaps the wrong people are making too much money and the right people not enough. How about the Status Seekers? Can we make it as chic to be a graduate nurse working in a hospital as an interior decorator specializing in drapes?

This realization of shortage should generate a lot of talk, which sometimes in America is a prelude to action. Those old rallying points — the home, the church, and the school — might conceivably resound with fresh words and determination about a boy’s future. Such talk could spread to newspaper editors, commentators, comic strip artists, and cartoonists. After a time the talk might result in a national purpose to staff freedom with our best and ablest brains instead of leaving matters to chance. The tools are at hand to do the job once the decision is made. All we need is the will to act. And the “good society” which could result might both confound Communism and lift Western civilization to new heights.