The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

ON THE WORLD TODAY

IS the Eightieth Congress a fair preview of Republicanism in power? Many Americans seem to think so, and by contrast Harry Truman begins to look good. If public opinion polls are any test, there has been a rash of second thoughts on the part of many who voted Republican with such enthusiasm in November, 1946. Some Democrats, pointing to the confusion and stagnation in the Congress, are even saying with malice, “Had enough?”

A good deal of the criticism, however, has been unfair. Under the American system it is the Executive who gets things done. No Congress, however completely under the domination of a single party, can run (or replace) the Executive, particularly if he is of the opposite party. The Democrats, when correspondingly situated from 1930 to 1932, were not much more successful than the Republicans today in enacting a strong and comprehensive program.

Still, the degree of disunity exhibited in Republican ranks has gravely impaired the party’s national standing. Everyone expected a split between the Republican leadership in the House, which tends to be narrow and rabid, and the Republican leadership in the Senate, which includes some wise and capable men. But serious differences have also emerged among the wise and capable. Even more discouraging is the apparent fact that the narrow and rabid Republicans, while lowering the national reputation of their party, are at the same time beating out the more enlightened leaders for the affection of the party’s angels.

The purely party pressures bearing on Senator Taft, for example, have brought out his worst side. He has been the major disappointment in this session, and his popularity has declined correspondingly in the polls. Senator Vandenberg’s popularity, meanwhile, has risen steadily as a result of his statesmanship over such issues as the Greek-Turkish program and the Lilienthal appointment.

Yet these very excursions into enlightenment evidently roused serious discomfort among his bigmoney supporters in Michigan and among the party “regulars” whose backing is essential for the Presidential nomination. Their pressure, observers feel, accounted for Vandenberg’s abrupt switch on the question whether the U.S. should fulfill its LendLease commitments to the U.S.S.R., and for his decision to vote against Gordon Clapp as head of the TVA after speaking for Lilienthal’s appointment to the Atomic Energy Commission.

Vandenberg’s dilemma (and one in which Stassen is also ensnared) is that statesmanship may pay off so far as the mass of the people — and probably the mass of Republicans — are concerned, but it does not pay off among the die-hards who run and finance the machine.

The Republicans on trial

A Republican Congress can presumably pass any bill the party wishe. In spite of this fact, Republican legislative achievements have been inconsiderable and largely negative. The Republicans, in a desperate effort to meet imprudent campaign commitments about tax reduction, have made extensive cuts in appropriations.

The current test of positive Republican objectives is provided by the party’s labor proposals. The Hartley bill, which has passed the House, is an undiscriminating compendium of practically all recent anti-union proposals, drawn up by wealthy corporation lawyers (who were identified in the House debate) and adorned by them with pious and unconvincing rhetoric about saving the workingman. Many Representatives voted for it under the assumption which is supposed to excuse so much ill-advised House legislation: that the Senate will tidy up a bill and strike out the excesses.

The burden-of being the majority party has focused public attention on the Republican divisions. No one should forget, however, that the Democratic representation in Congress is equally, if at the moment less noisily, divided. The curve from Pepper to O’Daniel is quite as long as the curve from Morse to Capehart.

The Wallace debate

The hullabaloo over Henry Wallace’s visit to Europe called attention to the fact that there are also divisions in what its members optimistically refer to as the American left. It should be said, with regard to the Wallace debate itself, that both sides can be charged with fatuousness. The proposals that the Logan Act of 1798 be invoked against Wallace and that his passport be revoked are self-evidently absurd; but even a normally sagacious man like Vandenberg complained to President Truman over behavior which disturbed neither of them when carried out in reverse a year ago by Winston Churchill.

Said one veteran Washingtonian after watching the fuss, “It is all nonsense. Henry Wallace has a complete right to make a damn fool of himself in every country in the world.”

More sober concern, however, was expressed over Wallace’s various claims to speak for the broad American masses, for the American liberal movement, for the New Deal, or for the Roosevelt tradition. Many old friends of Wallace regret that he has permitted his present associates to hang the cloak of F.D.R. over his inadequate shoulders and trot him out as the chosen and exclusive champion of American progressivism.

The cold fact is, of course, that not a single person prominently identified with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal supports Wallace in his present vagaries. Harold Ickes, who broke with Truman long before Henry Wallace did, observed, “We can thank our stars today that we have as President the man that we have, if the alternative would have to be Henry A. Wallace.” Bob La Follette’s organ, The Progressive, pronounced a blunt epitaph: “The radical democrat of Iowa has now become the Soviet defender of New York.” Even Mrs. Roosevelt now calls him “Don Quixote.”

The liberals and the left

The extent to which the New Dealers have repudiated Wallace has been emphasized by the success of the new liberal organization, Americans for Democratic Action. This group provides a home for so many former New Dealers that, as a wit has remarked, it looks like a government-in-exile.

ADA grew out of a conference of liberals who felt that the American progressive movement would be immobilized until it rid itself of the Communist problem. It consequently rejects all collaboration with American Communists or fellow travelers; and by virtue of this rejection, it hopes to approach the questions of the day on their merits, without reference to the current Soviet line and without wasting time and energy in combating Communist cliques inside the organization.

This independence is particularly important in the case of foreign policy, where Communists and their allies have tried to commit the whole liberal movement to the unconditional support of the U.S.S.R.

ADA’s leaders include such established liberals as Wilson Wyatt, Leon Henderson, Chester Bowles, Paid Porter, Elmer Davis, Reinhold Niebuhr, Barry Bingham. In view of Henry Wallace’s pretensions to the Roosevelt mantle, it is interesting to note that Eleanor Roosevelt, her exceedingly able son Franklin, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, and James Roosevelt are all affiliated with ADA. The only Roosevelt the self-constituted heir of F.D.R. can carry with him is the rather erratic Elliott.

Wallace’s followers are organized in Progressive Citizens of America, though neither Wallace nor Elliott Roosevelt is a member of this Communist-infiltrated organization. The leaders of PCA are Jo Davidson, the sculptor, and Frank Kingdon, a radio commentator. PCA contains no national political figures and no important New Dealers.

As against the ADA position, PCA members argue the possibility of collaboration between liberals and American Communists and fellow travelers; and they argue also the general superiority of Soviet foreign policy to American. Since both these questions depend on a basic evaluation of Communism and the U.S.S.R., the differences between the two groups are not likely to be easily compromised.

Experienced observers regard this split not as a disaster to the American left, but as the beginning of its political maturity. They point out that in countries where free political expression remains, a sharp distinction is drawn between Communists and those leftists who believe in individual dignity and personal freedom.

The Truman doctrine

The Wallace attack on the Truman program for aid to Greece and Turkey performed at least one useful service: it underscored the ambiguous passages in Truman’s ill-considered speech on the question. In this address the President indulged in brave but vague rhetoric about America’s obligation “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”

As Wallace read these lines, they seemed to him to commit the U.S. to an unlimited crusade against the U.S.S.R., in which it would welcome as allies all anti-Soviet states, no matter how corrupt or reactionary. Charles A. Lindbergh, evidently agreeing with Wallace’s analysis, endorsed the policy.

Even in quarters less extreme, Truman’s statement of policy roused misgivings. The program for aid to Greece and Turkey could have been justified in terms, say, of Roosevelt’s quarantine speech of 1937, or in terms of maintaining the Teheran and Yalta arrangements, without these latter-day rhetorical adornments. Indeed, the Administration’s presentation of its case could hardly have been more skillfully designed from the point of view of awakening legitimate anxieties. Probably no bill of equal importance has been enacted in recent years with so little basic enthusiasm.

If the President’s initial address had eschewed inflammatory rhetoric; if it had incorporated the substance of the recommendations for the reform of the Greek government made by Secretary Marshall in a note a few weeks earlier; if it had incorporated the Vandenberg amendment and other gestures toward the UN, it would have been much less vulnerable. The White House calculation seems to have been, however, that the Republican Congress can be stimulated into releasing money for foreign spending only by invoking the specter of Communism.

Support or intervention?

The Wallace interpretation of the Truman doctrine will presumably be disproved in practice. The United States government never intended an unlimited subsidy to the Greek government, as Washington feels Wallace should have known or could have discovered. Paul Porter, head of an economic mission to Greece, and Lincoln MacVeagh, our Ambassador, have made clear their conviction that money lent to the present Greek government will be wasted unless its spending is closely supervised.

The State Department has been reluctant, however, to avow its operating intentions within Greece lest it expose the program to attacks from a fresh direction. If the United States does not say it will administer the loan, it is accused of unlimited support of reactionary governments; if it does say that it intends to follow through on the use of every cent and every half-track, it will be accused (largely by the same critics) of imperialistic intervention in the affairs of a friendly people.

The Wallace uproar will have its good effects. The Administration will probably weigh its words more carefully another time and pay more attention both to the UN and to the importance of affirming the American belief that economic reconstruction and political democratization provide the only lasting answers to Communism. But so many misconceptions, falsifications, and convictions of martyrdom have gone into the Wallace performance that gratitude to him can hardly be considered a leading Washington emotion.

THE MOOD OF THE CAPITAL

Beneath the political hubbub, deeper apprehensions have been stirring Washington in recent weeks. All of a sudden, everyone has been struck with the ominous significance of the steadily rising prices.

It is becoming clear that inflation has dissipated a good deal of the hoarded purchasing power on which business had counted to maintain the boom; that the unusually high corporate profits signify large sums of money withdrawn both from capital formation and from purchasing power; and that further increases in wages in order to make up the lag in consumers’ activity can have only a temporary effect.

The Administration now recalls with bitterness rhe theory, current a year ago in Republican speeches and NAM advertisements, that OPA was the great bar to production and that its destruction and the consequent higher prices would call forth so much output that competition would drive the prices down.

As Truman remarked at a recent press conference, the free enterprise system now has a chance to show whether it can work. Even Alfred M. Landon has said that the high prices are a greater threat to American capitalism than the Communist Party has ever been.

Few put much stock in the readiness of businessmen to initiate, under their own responsibility, an orderly reduction of prices. Few believe it politically possible to get an adequate tax, fiscal, or price-control program through the present Congress. And there is a widespread fatalistic expectation of a slump in the fall which may or may not be arrested before it plummets into depression.

Quite apart from the domestic repercussions, observers point to the bad consequences a sharp price break and a recession would have for United States foreign policy. A depression would make the Republican Congress retreat even more precipitately from the expense of maintaining the United States as a global economic and military power.

It would also drive away the nations we are currently trying to persuade to link their economies with us instead of the Soviet Union. And, by demonstrating dramatically the instability of the capitalist system, it would lend new documentation to Communist propaganda throughout the world. The expectation of American economic collapse certainly accounted in part for the stiffening of the Soviet position at Moscow.