The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THE jockeying for position in the new Congress shows that isolationism is very much alive.

This fact may seem surprising after the two defeats sustained by the isolationists in G. O. P. councils. A resolution pledging international coöperation came out of the annual meeting of the National Committee. It was so couched as to seem to put the party back to its 1916 status. When Harrison Spangler of Iowa was voted into the chairmanship, the isolationists were undaunted. No sooner had the Seventy-seventh Congress passed into oblivion than they began gunning for power in the new Congress. Their main target was Senator Austin of Vermont.

Senator Austin is assistant Republican whip. His record of support for President Roosevelt’s foreign policy is 100 per cent. He is no rubber stamp; he is a man of character and vision who has grown in stature along with his country. There is no more upright and conscientious man in public life. Yet because, to quote Senator Nye of North Dakota, he has “too much of an international view on foreign affairs,’ the isolationists sought to oust him as Senator McNary’s deputy. They were routed, but the battle will be unceasing.

Indirect opposition

Some members of this flying wedge, of course, are less isolationist than anti-Roosevelt. A few are so pathologically anti-Roosevelt that their isolationism looks like cloak. That for such politicians as Senator Wheeler of Montana. Men, not principles, make the stuff of their controversy. The characteristic of their opposition is indirectness. Isolationism may be a remnant of old party divisions, but new life can be put into it even in wartime, by emphasizing present discontents with the sacrifices we have to endure and with the maladministration of the agencies levying those sacrifices. The tactic is to needle the President through the administrators, especially those who are also his friends.

Already chosen for attack is Harry L. Hopkins. Hopkins might be called Mr. Roosevelt’s alter ego. It may have seemed of late that recent appointees were elbowing him aside — for instance, Admiral Leahy and Mr. Byrnes. The first is the President’s Chief of Staff on the war front, who presides over the meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The other is the President’s Chief of Staff on the home front, who directs half a dozen lesser czars. Though both are powerful men, they have not shaken Mr. Hopkins’s position. That is shown in the deference which greets him whenever he appears at a meeting of any of the war boards. The military-civilian tug-of-war is postponed as soon as he comes into the room.

One could wish that boards which witness more wrangling than work could feel his pressure on some permanent basis — say, the Combined Production and Resources Board, which is engaged in pooling Allied resources in warmaking. The harmony prevailing in the Munitions Assignments Board, of which Mr. Hopkins is chairman, and which allocates our finished products, is a testimony to Mr. Hopkins’s standing.

“A Belshazzar feast”

Mr. Hopkins was formerly called the crown prince of the New Deal and as such he has always been a target for the anti-Rooseveltians in Congress. On December 16 he and his wife were feted, along with sixty others among the top-flight of America’s officialdom, at what Representative Hoffmann called “a Belshazzar feast” in honor of the nuptials. The host was Bernard M. Baruch. It was a choice dinner, and gossip reported that gifts of great value were presented to the newlyweds. This story Mrs. Hopkins and others have flatly denied, but the entire incident has given a special opportunity to Mr. Hopkins’s enemies.

This story of the gifts, which was promptly picked up by Axis propaganda, is a troublemaker. It was picked on with delight by the dissidents in Congress as a handy weapon with which to belabor Mr. Hopkins and, through Mr. Hopkins, the President. Their animus may take the form of a special investigation of Lend-Lease operations.

Lend-Lease under scrutiny

The speciousness of the maneuver is apparent on several counts. In the first place, Mr. Hopkins has nothing to do with Lend-Lease. The administrator is Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., to whom the President on October 28, 1941, delegated “any power or authority conferred upon the President” under the Lend-Lease Act. Secondly, Lend-Lease operations are under regular scrutiny by Congress. Senator Butler of Nebraska, one of the oppositionists behind this maneuver, says, “I dread to think what is happening behind the scenes of LendLease.” Actually the Senator would find nothing at all hidden, except perhaps what we get on reciprocal account.

The Lend-Lease Act called for reports at intervals not less frequent than ninety days. These have been supplied in mountainous detail. Moreover, by this time it must be clear to any realist that Lend-Lease is one of the most formidable agencies for winning the war. In fact, a very sage observer in the capital the other day gave as his considered opinion “that Lend-Lease has saved the world.”

But it is apparent that if the Administration cannot head off a special investigation, it may have a headache to cope with. It may then have another isolationist quarrel on its hands over the renewal of the reciprocal trade authority with which Secretary Hull’s name is indelibly associated.

The Lame Ducks migrate

Among the men most alarmed by the decline of Congress is Representative Sumners, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Sumners is a power in the House. He and many others are troubled over the seduction of Congressmen by the prospect of White House jobs. Lame Ducks appear to gravitate immediately to the Executive branch. Examples are Senator Lee of Oklahoma and Senator Brown of Michigan. If a Congressman, dependent upon the vagaries of the electorate, sees the prospect of an Executive post when the people turn him out, he is tempted to court White House favor while in office. Sumners wants to bolster the independence of Congress by making a Lame Duck wait two years before he can get an Executive appointment.

The inflationary gap widens

Taxes will be early business. The inflationary gap is growing with the progressive decline in the amount of consumer goods available for purchase by swelling war incomes. The pressure of flush money on scarce goods was so terrific this Christmas that shelves in many stores were depleted almost before people had begun to shop.

This excess money must be mopped up in one way or another, whether by a general sales tax, compulsory saving, or both. The Treasury has opposed both plans. But there are signs that the Treasury will be less critical of any fiscal program that may come out of the Ways and Means Committee, especially some version of the Ruml payas-you-go plan.

However, there will be no relaxation in the drive for social reforms on the part of the Roosevelt administration. The social consciences of the New Dealers have been stirred afresh by the recent pub-

WASHINGTON (continued)

lication of the Beveridge Report in Britain. How social security can be extended in America is a problem for which the Beveridge Report affords little guidance. Britain, as Sir William Beveridge has said, is more homogeneous than America. In consequence, social security in Britain is centralized and, moreover, is aimed at ensuring subsistence; ours is decentralized and is synchronized with our divergent wage scales. Congress, both as the custodian of state rights and as the more conservative branch of government, will have something to say about American Beveridgeism.

Members of Congress who are trying to make Congress count as a constructive force in the prosecution of the war already form an impressive phalanx. They are lined up behind the PepperTolan bill for a thoroughgoing reorganization of the war administration. Around this bill revolves the constant military-civilian fight outside the day-to-day tussles in actual administration. The President has made a concession to this group by putting Selective Service under the War Manpower Commission.

THE MOOD OF THE CAPITAL

The mood of the capital is that with the good news on the military and production fronts the time has come to be thinking about the post-war world. There is no inconsistency between this mood and the obsession with war organization. For our wartime controls will not be demobilized on the day after victory. Some of them, at least, will have to function during the long armistice. Blueprints of the peace and of America’s role in it are the specialty of the Administration. But they have not passed unnoticed in Congress. One of the most significant debates of the closing days of the Seventy-seventh Congress dealt with peace problems. Die-hards and purists in the Senate had objected to an executive agreement with Panama on the ground that it should have been presented as a treaty. An agreement, of course, requires ratification only by a majority; a treaty, by twothirds.

Isolationists sounded a warning note that all our commitments with the world must one day be put in treaty form and submitted to the Senate. “I do not believe,” said Senator Taft, “that Congress is bound to make any treaty carrying out the policies of the Charter.” Isolationists of all degrees applauded. The warning should not be ignored.