The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

ON THE WORLD TODAY

NO QUESTION in Washington evokes more interest than that of the President’s health. But it may be taken for granted that the President would not appeal again to the electorate were he incapacitated. There were, however, some in his immediate circle who did not think that he should run. They included Mrs. Roosevelt herself. But it was not on grounds of health that Mrs. Roosevelt was against the President’s candidacy for a fourth term. She felt that if he had to work with a Republican Congress the government might lack coherence.

The responsibilities of the Presidency even in normal times are onerous in the extreme. In wartime they are back-breaking. They are especially heavy now, because the President has never developed the habit of delegating authority. He still retains the last word, for instance, in the settlement of labor disputes which come to a national broil.

Yet never in America’s history have we had a President upon whom the burden of office has produced less physical strain. As was said of a French king, he knows the trade of being a king. But that is only one explanation of his fortitude. He can shed the cares of the Presidency — which have become the cares of an Atlas — with facility. He does not take any worries to bed.

The President, however, had a very hard winter. Like all Washingtonians during a singularly mild though erratic season, he had his share of colds, and they led to a combination of influenza, sinus, bronchial, and intestinal troubles. His stay at Bernard M. Baruch’s place in South Carolina set him up. But it was thought advisable, before he made his decision to run again, to give him a thorough checkup at the Naval Hospital in Washington. The results of the checkup were announced on June 9. His personal physician, Admiral Ross T. Mclntire, declared, “We are well within our normal limits in all regards, and it is a great satisfaction to all of us.” Not till this statement was issued would any newspaper correspondent prognosticate a run for a fourth term. In succeeding press conferences the President has looked fit and alert.

Will the South revolt?

The Southern revolt against the President has raised a subject which has had endless repercussions. The movement, of course, has less to do with the voters than with the Southern leaders. The three state conventions in Texas, South Carolina, and Mississippi have decided to free their Presidential electors from the customary obligation to carry out the mandate of the people in casting electoral votes for Presidential candidates. In other words, the electors won’t be rubber stamps.

Here is a sword that will hang over the President’s head until he conforms to sundry Southern demands in the convention and the campaign. The Southerners want the return to the two-thirds convention rule; they want the displacement of Mr. Wallace; they want a vaguely worded pronouncement in behalf of white supremacy. If Mr. Roosevelt does not conform, he may find his supporters in the three states denied the suffrage when the electors meet. The denouement would, of course, be of revolutionary significance only in a close election. Between them the three states control forty votes in the electoral college. Forty votes have been decisive before, and they may be decisive this year. No wonder, therefore, that the freeing of the electors of the three states has caused considerable perturbation.

What would happen if the threat were carried out and these electors switched their votes to the Republican candidate? President Harrison once said there would be lynchings if the electors did not behave as puppets. Suppose that on the morning of November 8 the people read that they have chosen a President through the orderly processes of our electoral system, and that six weeks later they discover that the voting in the electoral college has nullified their choice. Certainly there would be trouble.

Few feel that the Southerners would dare go through with it. But a Supreme Court justice who discussed the scheme remarked that the judiciary could not prevent it, since the electors can constitutionally vote for whomsoever they please; but he echoed Harrison in adding drily: “There would be civil commotion before the case came before us.”

The electoral college

The reaction to the Southern scheme has served to revive a Congressional proposal for the abolition of the electoral college. The college is the vermiform appendix of our political system, anyway. But it stems from the Constitution, and the founding fathers inserted provision for it as a safeguard against what Woodrow Wilson called “the sweep and power of popular majorities.”

Resolutions designed to remove it were introduced in both the House and the Senate in 1933, and the Senate resolution fell only two votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority. The fresh resolution, like the old resolutions, would not change the number of electoral votes to which each state is entitled, but the people of the states would vote directly for Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates and not for Charlie McCarthy electors. The resolution will come up after recess.

The hubbub gives point to Mr. Dewey’s indictment of the quarrelsomeness of the Roosevelt administration. Two members of the President’s official family were mentioned in connection with the electoral stratagem. Both of them have denied participation. But the mention of the alleged activity of one of them, Jesse Jones, has revived wonder that Jones is still retained in the President’s cabinet. Jones, however, is one of the great powers of the land. As the PoohBah of the administration, he wields enormous control, and he is, moreover, a person of consequence in Southern politics. It was this influence that persuaded the President to side with him in the WallaceJones feud over the purchase abroad of strategical materials.

The two-thirds rule

The Republican platform contained no provision for the modernization of our governmental structure. It might have earned political capital by demanding the excision of the electoral college, for the three-state

maneuver presents Mr. Roosevelt with the issue of popular government itself. Nor did the platform say anything about the need to abolish the two-thirds rule for the ratification of treaties. This is a great disappointment to many.

That a minority of one third, plus one, of the Senate can block treaties is one of the reasons that our allies are skeptical about the coherence of America’s foreign policy. They have not forgotten Mr. Wilson’s fate at the hands of a “ willful minority.” The two-thirds rule is as antiquated as the electoral college; and just as the latter was a safeguard against too much democracy, so the former was the safeguard of a nation which the founding fathers imagined would always be a small, defensive power.

American leadership in the World of Nations cannot coexist with the two-thirds rule, and there is a lot of support for the use of executive agreements instead.

Certainly the executive agreement, which requires only majority ratification, has been used frequently in the past in lieu of treaties. But there are objections to the device. It is never healthy to by-pass the Constitution. It would be much better to make a frontal attack on the two-thirds rule, and the Republican Party, claiming as it does to be forward-looking, should have taken the lead.

Again, the Republican platform said nothing about the need for reform of the machinery of Congress. Just before recess members of Congress, stung perhaps by the avalanche of criticism which has spread from experts in government to the general public, bestirred themselves: the Senate Rules Committee approved the Maloney-Monroney resolution to set up a joint bipartisan committee to study the reorganization of Congress. Quick endorsement of the project appears to be assured when Congress returns. The study may lead to the most profound changes in the history of Congress — changes which have been advertised as urgent by wartime experience.

The theme of the Republican convention was freedom. The enemies of freedom are those who, as Representative Jerry Voorhis says, pin their hopes “upon the ascendancy of the Presidency over Congress.” If, therefore, Congress can modernize its machinery, simplify its operations, improve its relations with other branches of the government, it will be better able to meet its responsibilities under our three-power system of government.

CIO in politics

Perhaps the greatest disappointment in the Republican platform was the straddle on our acute labor problem. Give part of the credit to the CIO Political Action Committee. In no other organization (it has

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been recruited in the main from Administration resignees) is there better economic talent or more astute political strategy. It may have seemed impolitic of the committee to go to the Republican convention after having endorsed Roosevelt. But hope springs eternal, and a handful of sops went to the Political Action Committee, and to organized labor generally, from the platform drafters. Actually the GOP went so far as to play into the hands of those labor leaders who are trying to tear down the wartime system of wage controls. The platform opposed these absolutely necessary controls. It even questioned the control over job transfer.

Labor, as even the Civil Liberties Union recognizes, requires freedom from irresponsible control exercised by labor tsars. But there is no plan discernible in the Republican platform to work for that freedom. The plank that the Department of Labor should he headed by a representative of labor is a corny suggestion which could scarcely be more illadvised. That we certainly know from our wartime experience.

In recent crises it has been difficult to obtain impartial handling of labor disputes by labor and industry members of the War Labor Board, and it is fairly generally recognized that the root of the trouble is the tripartite setup. Labor policies, no less than others, should be administered by representatives of the public, not by representatives of a particular class or group.

The Republicans missed a great chance of appealing to middle opinion when they failed to go to the heart of our chaotic labor situation. Certainly a review of the Wagner Act is overdue. It is the law — not the executive edicts which were inveighed against — that has allowed chaos to develop in labor relations.

THE MOOD OF THE CAPITAL

The mood of the capital has swung — if our military pundits are any guide —* to overoptimism.

There is, of course, a lively interest in the political campaign. If the election were held now, the President would be handsomely re-elected, for there has been a great unpublicized swing to him since the opening of the western front.

Mr. Dewey will have to work hard to shake the Presidential hold. That is to say, he must show leadership in the sense of policy-making over and above the platform. If, as is said, he intends to conduct a sedate campaign, with a minimum of barnstorming, he might as well fold up his tents. For, aside from the idolatry given to Mr. Roosevelt by the masses, events will work for the President whether the war deteriorates before the election or is obviously in the penultimate stage when voting time comes. And there is no other alternative on the horizon.