The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THE stiffening in Congress as the result of the election is portentous. Congress has got encouragement from the turn in the tide of war. It intends to oversee the conduct of the war, to use its investigatory power more thoroughly, and generally to assert itself against any further grant of blank checks to the Executive. The new temper was evidenced by the refusal of the Ways and Means Committee to report out in the original form an Administration bill which would enhance the President’s war powers. This measure was the third war-powers bill.

What is requested by the White House is conceded in most quarters to be highly necessary. In the third war-powers bill, Mr. Roosevelt asks for authority to suspend tariff, immigration, and other barriers for the duration. At present these peacetime restrictions hinder the war effort.

Congress gets stubborn

There would be no repeal of these obstacles, only a suspension. Yet Congress balks at Mr. Roosevelt’s blanket request, and in all probability will restrict it.

The reason for Congressional stubbornness is a deep-seated fear of executive orders that has become almost rabid. And Mr. Roosevelt has mostly himself to blame. In two recent instances he simply set aside the plain intent of Congress. They occurred in the administration of the Stabilization Law.

The first was at the expense of the farmers. Ceiling prices on farm products were fixed below the full parity price, though the Act is explicit on the point. This high-handed procedure has made the farmers irate. Already they are seething with irritations over the favoritism accorded industrial workers, the disregard of their needs in rationing gas, the drain of manpower from the farms by local draft boards and the pied pipers in war industry. But the interpretation of the Stabilization Law made them furious. “I knew the dictatorship idea had made a lot of progress,” said Senator Reed, “but I’ll be damned if I thought it had reached the point where the plain language of the law could be ignored.” Senator Prentiss M. Brown, of Michigan, lost his seat on account of the part he played in the affair.

The second example of alleged usurpation was at the expense of the salariat. Congressional debates make it clear that Congress never intended to clothe the President or Stabilization Director with powers to fix salary ceilings.

Indeed, the Ways and Means Committee had specifically rejected proposals by the Treasury to put upper limits on personal incomes when the tax bill was under discussion. To be sure, the stabilization bills in both the Senate and the House contained a provision authorizing the President to correct “gross inequities” in wages and salaries. But the question of the $25,000 ceiling was disposed of — supposedly — in the Rules Committee. To be sure, there are only a few thousand Americans who are affected by the $25,000 ruling. There will be more, of course, if the President can make Congress extend the ceiling to incomes other than salaries. But that is not the point. The point is that leaders in Congress of the caliber of Senator George and Representative Sumners feel that Congress itself is being undermined.

Congress investigates

Certainly the Executive’s path is bound to be more difficult than heretofore. There will be less loose lawmaking. There will be less blanket lawmaking. Congress is preparing to use its power of investigation. Now, with the new spirit of watchfulness on the Hill, two new investigations are in the cards.

The first is a House inquiry into the government bureaucracy, under Representative Ramspeck, and the other is the Senate investigation by the Judiciary Committee into the particular bureaucracy in the Office of Censorship.

The bureaucracy in Washington has already made the Capital into a vast circumlocution office where all the ills charged against the country at large can be found. Jurisdictional disputes over spending, duplication of effort, red tape, hoarding of labor — they are all present.

The manpower dispute

The outstanding jurisdictional dispute has been the military versus civilian row in the War Production Board. That grew so big that it was sometimes called the “Battle of Washington.” The line of demarcation between military and civilian functions in industry proved so indistinct that any compromise was sure to contain the seeds of further trouble.

One cannot blame the military. Actually Mr. Nelson delegated to them powers over industry beyond the plenary powers he himself received under the executive order setting up his establishment. The problem, in the interests of efficiency and the fitness of things in a democratic society, was how to retrieve those powers. But this is one of many interdepartmental disputes arising out of an organization all choked up with extravagance and red tape.

Now that the President has been responsive to the pressure from Congress for a unified administration over manpower, the overall authority given Paul V. McNutt will end both confusion and competition. Selective Service has hitherto been assigned periodical quotas by the War Department, and the local draft boards have filled them with little regard for rival claimants on the farm and in war industry.

With practically the entire country engaged in war work, there was no policy for putting the right man in the right place. All the Manpower Commission could do in the circumstances was to emit excellent advice which nobody heeded. Now that Selective Service is to be demoted as an operating agency under the WMC, the claims on manpower will be met systematically and under civilian apportionment.

The Ramspeck inquiry will restrict itself to the manpower situation in Washington. Lack of economy in using our human resources is evident on all sides. The figures speak for themselves. The last available data for the Federal establishment were compiled at the end of July. They then stood at 2,327,932. This compares with 1,391,689 at the end of July, 1941. Thus we have been increasing the number of Federal employees by over 80,000 a month.

Are they all necessary? Granted that the job we have undertaken is the greatest in our history, yet the government is grossly overstaffed. The War Production Board, for example, has a staff of 17,631, though the same agency in World War I got along with 750. The War Department has 1,100,000 civilian employees with 58,000 here in Washington. In 1918 the Department employed 37,400 in Washington, though the size of the army was the same then as now. Of course, the plans call for a much bigger army, and this necessitates an increase in clerical force. But precisely because of such a heavy draft upon the nation, the same obligation applies to the executive departments as to industry at large: to be economical of labor.

The censorship inquiry will go to the very roots of our free institutions. There has been much grumbling over our information policy. Recently criticism has shifted to the censorship, both postal and foreign. Governor Gruening of Alaska has descended on Washington with citations of foolish mishandling of mail between Alaska and the United States. Business and personal letters having no connection with the war have been tampered with. Even newspapers consigned to the troops in Alaska have had editorials clipped out. Correspondents in this country for British newspapers have added a flood of complaints of the arbitrariness of censorship.

Aid and comfort to Goebbels

In the old days military information was easy to discern. But in this war the weapons of warfare are as much psychological as military. Hence a wide discretion is left to the censors to delete matter which might give aid and comfort to Mr. Goebbels as well as the Nazi war machine. For this reason Representative Maas’s radio blast exposing deficiencies in our operations in the Pacific was kept out of dispatches abroad, notwithstanding the fact that it could easily have been monitored by enemy stations. Likewise Walter Lippmann’s column dealing with the Maas speech fell foul of the censors. Criticism of British policy appearing in American newspapers may be excised if it appears in the cabled messages of foreign correspondents. Even the Senate filibuster on the poll tax got blue-penciled as reported by the newspapermen.

One feels some sympathy with censors who have to figure out what might give aid and comfort to our enemies. But the fact remains that in the attempt to keep information away from the enemy, we are in danger of promoting trouble among ourselves. News of American criticism of Britain is bound to get to Britain somehow, and is then likely to be puffed up out of all proportion to its importance.

Anyway, the Senate Judiciary Committee intends to look into the entire problem. It was so shocked over Governor Gruening’s disclosures that it recalled a bill giving the Office of Censorship powers over communications between the United States and other territories and possessions aside from Alaska. Perhaps the news of the probe — let alone the results — will lessen the censor’s arbitrariness. That could be done by sharpening rules and regulations emanating from the Office of Censorship in the light of experience. Some such effort is badly needed, for too much liberty with our liberties is given to the individual censor. Armed only with general directives, he is bound to follow the newspaper motto, and cut out when in doubt.

An example of censorship which is troubling the Capital is the Darlan case. On the grounds of military necessity, comment against the Admiral was at first withheld by newspapers in general. But there was no such caveat against pro-Darlan comment. In consequence, the American people have been treated to one-sided comment on the first political step that this country has taken in the offensive against Hitler. Without a doubt the episode is troubling our transatlantic relations. Not only this country but Britain censored outside communications on Admiral Darlan.

THE HOPE OF THE CAPITAL

The overall mood of the Capital, nevertheless, is buoyant. News of the successes in Africa and Russia, coming on top of Admiral Halsey’s plucking of victory out of the jaws of defeat in the Pacific, has reduced by some years most of the prognostications about the end of the war in Europe.

There is likewise a revolution in transatlantic relations. The effort in Africa has evidently produced a like-mindedness both in strategy and in the pooling of production between the United States and Britain. At any rate, some degree of unity has now been achieved. The African offensive may not have been part of an overall plan. But, as Napoleon said, “war can be made to support war,” and this is what is happening.

The whole of our military thinking has now been shifted from the training camp to the fighting front. Plans have been made in the post-African negotiations with Captain Oliver Lyttelton, Britain’s Minister of Production, to maintain the initiative by overhauling all priorities. Ships will now come first in our production program, aircraft next, and finally equipment of the ground forces. That order of priority shows that offensive thinking has now taken thoroughgoing possession of the military authorities in Washington.