In article .net, "Dan/W4NTI"
w4nti@get rid of this mindspring.com writes:

All very interesting and sanitized I am sure. IMHO the reality of it all
was the 'CLASS A' crowd were

[expletive deleted]

because of the Technican and Novice
licenses and wanted a return to the pure days of pre war USA.

Dan,

Why would the "Class A" folks be angry about Techs and Novices? The Techs were
all on VHF/UHF, and the Novices were limited to little bits of three HF bands
with CW only, plus a bit of 2 meters.

It would make much more sense that they were still grumbling about the Great
Giveaway of December 1952, which gave all privs to Generals and Conditionals.
Previously, if you wanted to work 'phone on any ham band between 2 and 25 MHz
you needed an Advanced (Class A) or Extra. Opening up the 'phone bands in early
1953 flooded them folks who had taken much easier written tests than the Class
A crowd.

So they tried to hornswaggle to FCC and the amateur community.

Well, they *said* they had majority support, and if you look at reports of the
time about FCC comments it seems that they did - a very slight majority.

When you've got folks like A. Prose Walker saying something needs to be done or
the ham allocations will be in big trouble, should he simply be ignored?

It didnt
work then....and it won't work now.

It seems to me that what happened then was that they raised the number of steps
and the requirements for a full privs license. Now, it seems that most
proposals, including ARRL's want to *lower* the number of steps and the
requirements for a full privs license. (Isn't that what happened in 2000?)

But I'll agree with you on this: Monkeying with the license requirements will
have only slight effects in what hams actually do. Did taking all those IL
cause lots of hams to suddenly put down the checkbook and pick up the sodder
arn? NOPE!

73 de Jim, N2EY

Hams are not that dumb.