The Honolulu Advertiser from Honolulu, Hawaii • 18

TliG Honolulu Advertiser Secrecy Can Destroy American Government i Democracy Dies In The Dark 103 Yeart Your Tamily Newspaper Established July 2, 158 Fublihd dully hf AJvirtiiinf PuMiiMnj Ctmpany, ltd. Advtrtitw Square 405 Kqpialani IM. Ssuth St. Honolulu Hawaii LORRIN P. THURSTON.

TmUmi and Genital Managn K. S. COLL, tutor Emeritus 'GEORGE CHAPLIN, Editor ALLAN J. McGUIHE. Bwinew Mgr.

BUCK BUCHWACH, Managing Editor THURSTON TWIGG-SSOTH, Assistant BuiinM Mgr. Represented Nationally by Th Katz Agency, Sup York, San Trancisco, lot Angtltt, Dallas, Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Atlanta, Syrteusi, Fbiltdtlpbia and Sattl. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1960 i Produce The Facts fm0m QgMOCRATIC Q0trsWo'r ltt A I vJiATL PUBLIC XV it said some changes in weighting had been made in the State Department formula. One of the changes was in the definition, of what constitutes a "tropical" city.

To qualify as "tropical," a city must have a mean average temperature of 76 It used to be 75 degrees. Honolulu's mean average is 75.1 degrees and it used to qualify. But now it misses being "tropical" by nine-tenths of a degree and the cost of living allowance is affected. Only a seasoned State Department officer, well-versed in diplomatic double-talk, could explain why, for want of nine-tenths of a degree of temperature, Hawaii's Federal workers must take a pay cut. MEANTIME, Vice President James Shoemaker of the Bank of Hawaii points out that consumer prices in Honolulu, as measured by the State, have risen 4.4 per cent in the past two years.

During 'the same period, living costs in Washington- went up only 1.9 per cent. True, the measurements weren't made on the same scale, so perhaps they prove nothing. But if these figures don't justify leaving the 20 per cent allowance at its present level, neither can anyone produce more valid figures to justify a decrease. On the basis of logic and fairness to Island civil servants, it strikes us the Federal government ought not to tamper with the cost of living allowance unless and until it can prove its case with more reliable facts. Federal white collar workers in Hawaii will suffer a pay cut next month when the 20 per cent cost of living allowance is reduced to 17Vi per cent.

The allowance is based on a comparison of living costs here and in Washington, D.C. It has been .20 per cent for the past nine years. A STATE Department survey team decided the spread between Honolulu -and Washington has narrowed during the past year. Under the law this requires a cut in the local allowance. This was determined through a formula used to compute the expenses of Foreign Service officers living aboard.

The formula attempts to allow for the differences in pattern of living and resulting cost differences between Washington, the base city, and other cities. For example, it presumably takes account of the fact Island residents do not need to heat their homes. This in turn would be balanced against the higher prices for food and other necessities in Hawaii. That seems like a sensible way to approach the problem. But the method has drawbacks.

For one thing, there is no single formula by which average living costs in Hawaii can be compared on the same, scale with average living costs in Washington. Consequently, when the Federal government compares the two, in some instances it very well may be comparing apples with oranges. WHEN THE Federal government announced the cut for Hawaii workers prior to the public access to the House of Commons, observed that as long as the House was closed, there wai no way that public opinion could have an impact upon the deliberations of the parliament. JOHN STUART MILL, summing up the attributes of good government in the light of his generation's liberal insights, found that popular government best, which most widely diffused the responsibilities of government, by extension of the franchise, by participation on juries, but above all, by the utmost possible publicity and liberty of discussion, whereby not merely a few individuals hi succession, but the whole public is made, to a certain extent, a participant in government, and shares in the instruction and mental exercise derivable from it. THE EARLY American Presidents thoroughly understood that free institutions and open institutions were one and the same thing.

GEORGE WASHING-' TON thought concealment a form of. lying. THOMAS JEFFERSON believed it a duty of government to give out information to the public so that it might be cast back in all the various forms into which public ingenuity might throw it. JAMES MADISON thought a free people without full information or the WIGGINS means of acquiring it but a prelude to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. The witnesses from every rank of government could be added ad infinitum.

That free governments had to be openly conducted, in the full light of free citizens, was a proposition that was universally conceded by the architects and first engineers of the American system. Practice vs. Theory THERE IS still a lot of lip service to the idea today. It is subscribed to as a general proposition. It is conceded as an ideal.

It is embraced as a theory. In practice, it is being abandoned at Federal, State and local levels, in legislative, judicial and executive bodies. Government is being operated, Increasingly, in the dark. Legislative bodies, local, state and national, are keep I Li! V- I IV" i I i in matnam stitutions were undertaken from abroad or pursued by some conspiratorial party, the nation would be aroused. Congressional committees would hail witnesses before them to ferret out the secret sources of this subversion.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation would unravel the innerworkings of the plot. Elections would be won and lost on the issue. Why No Alarm? WHY DOES the slow and silent erosion of our government organization, being accomplished by the consent to secrecy, provoke no such alarm? Why is the struggle against it almost entirely confined to a few editors, assumed by the public to be selfishly con-cerned with getting news? Chiefly, I think it is because we know that most of those involved in this subversion do not intend harm. Mostly because the "conspirators" here are not strangers, unknown to us, but, for the most part, our very friends. And because they are our friends, they are more dangerous than if they were our enemies.

Were an enemy to do what we allow our friends in government to do, day after day, we would know these secret maneuveririgs as hostile acts, subversive of public order. But we are disarmed by the innocence of their intentions, the while we are dismayed by their ignorance of the'valye of public discussion to use a Jeffersonian phrase. Public Must Act THUS DISARMED friendship, we countenance by our silence, or by the feebleness of our protest, precedents of secrecy that set afoot successive imitations and that surely wll lead, unless somewhere checked, to the alteration of the system of government itself. We must cry out against these invasions of the righ) of citizens to know not because we hate or suspect those who withhold information but because, we hate the kind of government into which their acta insensibly lead. Democracy, when it at tempts to operate in the' dark, ceases to be de? mocracy.

We must demand that the great decision-making acts of gov ernment take place in1 broad daylight, in ful view, where every citiy zen willing to put his mind to the task, can make his influence felt on public policy. We may adhere to popular elections. We may continue popular legislative assemblies. We may choose our own executive officers. All these things are the apparatus of democracy.

If, once chosen, the agents of the people operate in secret, we will still have all the apparatus and all the appearance of self-government, but none of the reality of it. Democracy In the dark is democracy defied. It is democracy diminished. It is democracy doomed. It is democracy destroyed.

Wake Up To Danger may good name of the upright judge and holds up to reproach the unrighteous one, prepares citizens for the exercise of their rights and exhibits the consequences of wrongdoing to public gaze. Abuses Abound Executive agencies of the Federal government, by the testimony of the Coolidge Commission, and of every other qualified student of the matter, have abused the use of the secrecy categories devised for purposes of security. Even congressional committees, competent experts have warned, probably know less about our military secrets than our enemies. BUT THE matter does not end, or even far begin, with military matters only. Executive agencies, operating without a shadow of judicial precedent, leaning on repeated naked assertions of right by government lawyers, distorting the plain instruction of our early history, have withheld from Congress and the public, matters essential to a right judgment on the most far-reaching legislative decisions.

Just Like Foes Notwithstanding the fact that too many congressional committee meetings are closed, Congress itself is a goldfish bowl compared to the federal executive departments. It deserves, moreover, great credit for further opening its business to public view by disclosing Senate payroll records in only the last session. State and local administrators, too, try to keep public matters from popular notice. Too often, subsequent history discloses that they kept the knowledge of public business secret from the ordinary citizen, but not from the informed few who were permitted by their exclusive knowledge to take unfair advantage of other citizens. Now all such processes are subversive of dem ocratic government.

If an effort so destructive of the very foundations of our in EDITOR'S NOTE: This address on secrecy in government was given by J. Russell Wiggins, executive editor of the Washington Post and President of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, to a recent meeting of educators at Atlantic City, N.J. The people of tfie United States have, for 40 years, ever since World War been involved in an experiment, the outcome of which is likely to shape the institutions under which they will live for generations to come. Few citizens are aware that the experiment is going on, and many of those who are vaguely aware of it are indifferent about it. By means of this experiment, now under way for nearly a generation, the world is likely to discover whether or not democratic government can operate in the dark.

No conspiracy of men has launched this adventure. It is something more? sinister than that. It is a conspiracy of circumstances. The processes of government, which from the adoption of the Constitution to World War were being more and more openly conducted, are being more and more secretly transacted as the result of cumulative unconscious choices. How It Began The primary causes of this trend include the secrecy imposed in World War the blow that world crisis gave to faith in free government, the disillusioning im-, pact of the depression, the second era of world war secrecy, and the period of cold war that has continued to this day.

Altogether, forces such as these, have reinforced in governmental officials at every level the natural impulse to secrecy over which the people had to triumph before any free governments emerged at all. NO ONE openly has proposed that we abandon democratic institutions and some of the most convinced practitioners of secret government would the most loudly deny that they have anything like that in mind. What they have in mind is of no moment. Whether their intentions are good or their intentions are bad is irrelevant. The proposition 'I submit is simply.

this: "Democracy in the Dark" is a contradiction in terms. The open conduct of public affairs is the first and primary attribute of democratic government; and when that is abandoned, the government that remains, whatever else it may be, is not a democratic government. Power of Public This was thoroughly understood by the philosophers of the Eighteenth Century whose theories and ideas found expression in the Constitution of the United States and in the kind of government that Constitution called into being. THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULEY, singling out the relation between open government and popular declared that "nothing could be more irrational than to give to the people power, and to withhold from them the knowledge without which that power might be abused." 0 LORD ACTON, studying the British government Abstraction Twelve prehistoric paintings discovered in a cave in the Ural Moun tains delighted Soviet art 1 experts until they went deeper into the cave and found a 13th painting. It showed a primitive man brandishing an automatic revolver.

Three boys in the neighboring vil- lage have confessed to the creation of all the art works. Die Tresse, Vienna abandoned democratic government through indifference, unconcern, even laziness. ON THIS PAGE today we reprint the remarks of J. Russell Wiggins, executive editor of the Washington Post and president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, on secrecy in government. Please read his speech, every word.

Please read it and wake up to what's going on to what you, the public, are permitting to happen. If you're a member of the American Legion or the VFW or Rotary or Kiwanis or a community association or a PTA or any other group, go to work. Arouse your fellow members. Adopt resolutions. Write letters to the Legislature.

Go to the Palace and tell the lawmakers face to face that you demand they do business in public. IT'S STILL your government but it will remain yours only if you insist on it. The lawmakers will end this dangerous secrecy only if you force them to. You get excited about new schools, about whether avenues should be widened, about subdivisions, about fluoridation. Why not get excited now about your most precious possession, American democratic government? When the Senate behind closed doors rejected some of Governor Quinn's major appointments, it did far more damag? than merely depriving individuals of jobs.

No doubt unintentionally but nonetheless effectively, the Senators trampled on democratic government. HAWAII HAS an anti-secrecy law. But the Senate claims it is immune. "We don't have to comply," says Senate President William H. Hill.

"We have things to do that are beneficial to the public." Senator Hill obviously speaks for the majority. He is misinformed. Secrecy in government far from being "beneficial" robs the public, cheats the public, threatens the public. It de-stroys the basis of democratic government, which is public participation. But the public which is you doesn't seem to care.

These things have happened before. Yet the public never complains. The newspapers do, but the public and the legislators write it off to newsmen's frustration. But it's far more than that. While the public slumbers, democratic government is endangered.

Every secret session is another termite hole in the structure of our government. Democratic government must have public participation to exist. The public which is you ha3 ing large areas of their business in the dark, by closing committee hearings and deliberations where the real processes of decisionmaking take place, by minimizing the real debate on the floor and substituting pro-forma discussions that only confirm decisions already made in cloak rooms and conference chambers, by caucuses of parties, groups and committees that can escape the requirements of open meetings where those statutory requirements exist. All Levels Infected Congress, which is better than many legislatures, holds about a third of its committee meetings behind closed doors by no means all of them concerned with military matters. State legislatures grow more covert about even the appropriation and budgetary processes that' most intimately concern the people.

Local boards, bureaus and councils resort to all kinds of devices to make their decisions privately. The courts, prompted by anxiety about juvenile offenders, worried about "trial by newspaper," fearful of corrupting public morals with lewd testimony and mindful of the damage publicity sometimes causes private litigants, close their proceedings all too frequently. As many as a third of all judicial proceedings in some cities are behind closed doors. good the motive, grave risks are run when courts are closed Open court proceedings protect not only the accused, but all society against the maladministration of justice and in all human history there has been devised no better agency than full publicity to achieve that end. The open court protects the quality of the evidence, increases the amount of the evidence, safeguards the lake 294 feet down, with crags around the margins standing 90 feet above the boiling and glowing liquid.

Thirty Years Ago 1930 Hawaiian Sugar Company's net profit in 1929 amounted to $611,747.34, equivalent to $4.07 per share. Twenty Years Ago 1940 Capture of the important city and fortress of Kowisto was claimed for Russian forces tonight by Radio Moscow in a military communique. Ten Years Ago 1950 Ben F. Rush, manager and chief engineer of the Territorial Board of Harbor Commissioners, disclosed Saturday that the board is planning $6,500,000 in additional improvements for territorial harbors. History From Our Files Pay Attention! 1 Aof: i the coconut nar (HOPPY) REIS, coach of the year by Club.

MORIOKA, 1960 president Community Council. i To HENRY named football the Quarterbacks To TED of the Palolo DOWN TO CASES llou nrd D. Case NON TROPICAL NOTE After noting that cold, white crown on the top of Mauna Kea, and the reasonably nearby volcanic activity in Kapoho, Kamaaina remarks that seems to be the only State in which one may ly SEE a snowball in that you-know-what place. Department of Definitions: Hat: Something no one can put on your head and make it feel like you put it there yourself. Hal C.

The federal income tax is the topic of a current TV series here, and Old-Timer says it's like a quiz program in which no one seems to know the answers. G. J. tells us that when some folks try to keep up with their neighbors, it's usually on the installment plan. Your Hokum for Today: "The whole town is talking about it Hundred Years Ago 1 M0 The custom house wharf is being stripped for the purpose of being repaired.

The removal of planks has shown that thieving by boys still continues, in stripping copper from the piles. Eighty Years Ago 1880 Lanai was visited by an extraordinary thunder-storm on Monday, accompanied by hail, which slightly damaged growing crops of wheat and oats. Sixty Years Ago-1900 The reason why the Government has not paid its current bills is that they have not been sent to' the auditor by the Finance Committee. The committee is studying over bills incurred on account of the plague. Forty Years Ago 1920 Halemaumau contains In Two Words On Page 46 of this week's Newsweek magazine there's a photo of the control panel of a Thor intermediate missile, all set to fire from a base in England should the day ever come.

Look at the picture. It shows the firing switch. It's set in the "off" position which on the panel is marked "PEACE." The other position is "WAR." It's that horribly simple. One cf every four Oahu traffic accidents is a rear end collision. One cause of these accidents is attentive driving.

The car in the picture recently rammed the rear of another car. Police charged the driver with not paying attention. The driver suffered two sprained wrists. You can see what happened to his car. Drive carefully.

Pay Stay out of rear end collisions. "1 jh ir-lf rf t-rj..