The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

ON THE WORLD TODAY

IT WAS with no clap of thunder that the news of the invasion of Hitler’s Fortress spread over Washington. For more than a month little else had been discussed. But all the speculation was underground. The censor even rebuked a Washington newspaper for suggesting, in a clearly unknowing manner, that the invasion might occur at any time.

There was a letdown when the President celebrated the fall of Rome without at the same time announcing that it had rung up the curtain for the breaching of Europe from the west. Now the invasion dominates everything. Yes, it is still called the invasion, despite the President’s last-minute effort to call it liberation, though this word is indubitably the meaning of the mightiest convulsion of all history.

The Supreme Court

The Supreme Court has made a great comeback. That is to say, it is back on the front pages, back as a tidbit of conversation in Washington salons, cafés, and taxicabs. People once more flock to the big marble palace on Capitol Hill and scan each Monday’s output of opinions to see what the Court has been up to. The Court has again become a hothed of conflicting ideas.

This ferment in the Court came to light at its first session of 1944. At first it seemed to be only a feud between Justices Hugo L. Black and Felix Frankfurter. For a single day the Senator-jurist from Alabama wrote two concurring opinions obviously designed to scorch the ears of the professor-jurist from Boston. That seemed to loosen pent-up antagonism in various other judicial breasts.

Justice Owen J. Roberts accused his brethren of destroying confidence in the law by upsetting precedents without good reason. Justice Frankfurter said amen. Then Justice Robert H. Jackson, who was President Roosevelt’s Attorney General before he went to the bench, drew upon his most biting judicial vocabulary to castigate the majority for rewriting the law from the bench to smack down a holding company. The Court, he said in a dissenting opinion supported by Roberts, Reed, and Frankfurter, was not upholding a policy of Congress, but was “competing with Congress in creating new regulations in banking.”

And in dozens of other opinions the Court — which has been denounced as a rubber stamp for Administration policy — has been sharply divided. It will not be surprising if historians discover its dissents this year to be more numerous than ever before.

Today there is general agreement in the Court as to that area of constitutional law out of which the sharpest conflicts of the middle thirties grew. The Court has not declared an Act of Congress unconstitutional in the last eight years. The great contest over governmental powers has ended in recognition of a plenitude of power in the Federal government.

So the intellectual arena in which the judges are fighting out their differences today is narrower in scope. They are chiefly concerned with interpretation of statutes, review of administrative orders, and proper enforcement of law through the courts. Consequently the lines of cleavage remain much more fluid than they were in the “old Court.” There is no well-defined liberal bloc or conservative bloc that always sticks together.

Yet certain combinations appear with increasing frequency. Justices Black, Douglas, and Murphy usually go further than their brethren in finding in the law what they wish to see there, and in overthrowing precedents if they stand in the way. Justice Roberts most frequently resists this trend. Immediately to the left of him stand Justices Frankfurter and Jackson, leaving Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone and Justices Stanley Reed and Wiley Rutledge as the pivots of the court. On a controversial issue their votes are likely to control the decision.

Does sharp division among the New Deal Justices again confirm the belief that the Court influences judges more than judges influence the Court? In some measure, perhaps. But there are many critics who say that the standards of legal judgment have been blurred —that interpretation of the Constitution and statutes is so loose nowadays as to give free play to individual views and predilections. The result is a period of confusion in the law — as the judges themselves clearly recognize.

Montgomery Ward vs. the Administration

Washington was deeply stirred by the Montgomery Ward controversy. It ignited smoldering emotions. Those emotions had only a remote relation to the conduct of Mr. Sewell L. Avery and the fate of the local CIO union representing the Ward employees.

As the case appeared from the banks of the Potomac, the chief issue was one of governmental powers. Ever since pre-war days a majority in Congress has been disturbed by the accretion of power in the White House. Often Congressmen have suppressed their feelings because they know that the delegation of enormous powers to the President cannot be avoided in wartime. But the Ward dispute gave them an ace that many could not resist playing.

Apparently the President and his advisers had similar reactions. A strike had broken out in the plant of a company with which they and the War Labor Board had had a number of difficulties. It gave them a chance to throw the War Labor Disputes Act back into the teeth of Congress.

That measure had been passed over the President’s veto. It had been aimed at John L. Lewis, President of the United Mine Workers. To turn it around and make it do service in behalf of maintenance of union membership — a purpose which Congress had never intended — would certainly cause that body to squirm, and no one loves an ironic little joke more than Mr. Roosevelt.

But someone apparently miscalculated the tenacity of Mr. Avery’s resistance. Borrowing a page out of Gandhi’s book, all Ward officials in the Chicago store practiced non-coöperation.

Their attitude drove the invading officials, Attorney General Francis Biddle and Under Secretary of Commerce Wayne Chatfield Taylor, into court, despite their previous reliance upon armed force in preference to a judicial determination of the issues. Before a decision could be rendered, however, the National Labor Relations Board had completed an employee election in double-quick time and the government had withdrawn from the plant.

What is a war plant?

It was the use of the troops in taking over a business not directly related to the war that threw Congress into a dither. Both branches launched investigations. Chairman Robert Ramspeck on the House side took testimony on what he called the “sit-down strike” of the Ward management as well as on the legal issues.

Senator Pat McCarran’s Judiciary Subcommittee concentrated on the legal and constitutional issues and brought in a peppery denunciation of the manner in which the case had been handled by the Attorney General, the WLB, the NLRB, and the Labor Department’s Conciliation Service.

Mr. Biddle had advised the President that seizure of the mail-order house was necessary because (1) it was engaged in activities essential to our war economy, and (2) an uninterrupted strike might spread to industries directly producing equipment for the Army and Navy. Orderly and peaceful means of disposing of the dispute, he said, had been exhausted. He concluded that the President had ample authority in both the War Labor Disputes Act and in his socalled general war powers to seize the plant if that appeared necessary to support, the war effort.

To this the McCarran Subcommittee replied that the Federal District Court had recognized the War Labor Board’s right to enforce its orders through the courts, so it had not been necessary to call in the Army; that the Attorney General had distorted the law enacted by Congress to permit seizure of struck war plants; and that he had claimed for the President war powers granted neither by Congress nor by the Constitution.

Here is the nub of the argument. Mr. Biddle had gone so far as to assert Presidential authority over “all phases of civilian life which contribute in any way to the prosecution of the war.” Most Congressmen hotly resent that implied encroachment upon the legislative power to raise and support armies and control the civilian economy in wartime. The Ward dispute is only one round in what is almost certain to be an extended fight on this issue.

Regulated manpower

At last the end of the road in manpower controls appears to be in sight. With all schemes for compulsory home-front service abandoned, the War Manpower Commission will extend its “priority referral” plan to all males throughout the nation about July 1. The system has already proved its usefulness in twenty-six labor-shortage areas. Its extension will tap the turnover in labor-surplus areas for the benefit of industries suffering from an acute shortage of workers.

The essence of the plan is community pressure on employers, labor unions, and individuals to get specific war jobs done. Each local managementlabor committee, in coöperation with local WMC representatives, works out a plan for its own area. Industries are listed in the order of their importance to the war effort and their need for workers. All employers are forbidden to hire men except through the United States Employment Service or its designated agents. By this means all men coming into the labor market are directed first to the plant where they are most urgently needed.

Employment ceilings for all firms hiring more than eight persons, even in labor-surplus areas, are designed to squeeze men out of nonessential industries for transfer to cities where shortages exist. To keep war production up to schedule, such transfers must be stepped up from 40,000 to 80,000 men a month during the summer and fall. Increasing pressure will be applied to local committees in areas with ample labor to meet their quotas of recruits for transfer to war plants in the busier cities.

The WMC insists that this entire program is voluntary, although men who leave essential jobs without permission, or who refuse to take any of the jobs offered, may find themselves deprived of work for sixty days. Some officials are eager to regularize these penalties by legislation, but no such action has been requested by the WMC or the President.

THE MOOD OF THE CAPITAL

The Capital is supremely confident of victory. How long it will take us to defeat Germany is no longer even hazarded, though only the cautious look beyond 1944. Even the military chiefs see victory this year. In political circles it is felt that military leadership, which has hitherto suffered from an excess of timidity, has absorbed the lesson of North Africa and Italy. As Lord Nelson said, success comes to the man who is a quarter of an hour ahead of the other man. Of late, military spokesmen have dinned into the ears of the Capital’s observers the need of keeping the invasion fluid.

The real danger is not military, but political. Nazi Germany will now seek more strenuously than ever to pull victory out of the jaws of defeat by splitting the Allies, and all kinds of political maneuvers are expected. The Capital is steeled against those maneuvers; it is hoped the country is too.