Millett: Service wife is confused
Ponders dates while he’s away
By Ruth Millett
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What’s going on behind the German defenses?
Big five run Germany’s war industry and they’re turning out the arms, too
But Hitler has little reserve
By Nat A. Barrows
How tough an opposition will our invading forces encounter when they land in Western Europe? What is really going on behind Hitler’s Atlantic Wall? From his observation post in neighboring Sweden, Nat Barrows has been collecting closely guarded information about Germany’s ability and willingness to cope with the titanic forces assembled in England for Allied victory. In a most important series of articles, of which the following is the fourth, Mr. Barrows reveals many hitherto unknown facts about the men directing the German war effort, Germany’s heavy industry, and other hitherto undisclosed information about the German war machine.
Stockholm, Sweden –
That vast mysterious war organization, the Speer Ministry, is herewith stripped of its secrets and shown for what it is – an industrial empire, conceived by a genius and implemented by five Nazi warlords ruthlessly exercising incredible powers, still intact but dangerously near collapse.
Nothing like it ever came out of any war before. No five men ever had greater power.
Now, after weeks of painstaking survey and rechecking of available sources, the story is told:
How the briefcase, lying beside Gen. Fritz Todt’s body in his wrecked airplane, offered the Third Reich two alternatives – in February 1942 – for revolutionizing German industry… how the second scheme, reducing red tape and bureaucracy to the barest minimum and permitting industry the maximum of self-government consistent with strong central authority, produced an empire without parallel anywhere… how that plan was developed into a smooth-working, skillfully coordinated network of war industries turning out huge quantities of guns, tanks, planes and submarines.
Controls the factories
Today, in the shadow of the Allied invasion, that great brainchild of Fritz Todt still wields immense power, still directly or indirectly controls every factory in the Reich, still keeps war production at high pitch.
But now it is at the saturation point. The peak has been reached. Munitions Minister Albert Speer and his four companions are extending the limits of Nazi war factories almost to the breaking point in their frantic necessity for building up more reserve stocks.
Germany, momentarily, has enough weapons and material on hand for an all-out counterattack of extremely vicious scale – in the west behind the Atlantic Wall, but only for a short-term campaign. I repeat: only for a short term.
The Speer Ministry based its production plan on the theory that Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (anti-invasion supreme commander) would succeed in crushing Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s bridgeheads and tossing the Allies back to the sea after a momentary breakthrough in the Atlantic Wall.
Industrial trouble
The Nazis do not have enough reserves and weapons, if not enough aircraft, for such a short-time defense. That is a fact.
But as soon as our invasion reaches the digging-in stage, the Germans are going to find themselves in serious trouble on the industrial front. Then they must begin drawing on reserves, already heavily strained by reserves on the Eastern Front, by terrific Anglo-American bombing raids and by hundreds of isolated setbacks, which are now beginning to show themselves on the production line.
In assembling material for this series – inside the Atlantic Wall – my colleague, Ossian Goulding of the London Daily Telegraph, and I have repeatedly been told by informants freshly arrived from Germany or France, that the Allies must continue their strategic bombing at any cost – even during the actual invasion – if they want to knock out German industry.
Transportation hard hit
Europe’s transportation has already taken such a heavy battering from the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Force that it is tottering and shaking. Factory workers are overworked and very tired. Enough key plants have been knocked out to increase the future value of every factory many times over.
Germany’s five autocratic warlords have definitely provided their soldiers and sailors with ample weapons and supplies to meet the Allied invasion on D-Day. But after the first stage is over, it is a black picture for them, especially if the Red Army mounts simultaneous attacks on the East.
In no way am I suggesting that the Nazi Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine or even Luftwaffe is going to fall apart like the old one-hoss shay for lack of equipment or lack of fanatical desire to fight to the death.
Even a brief analysis of Germany’s internal setup – the Speer Ministry, for example – will show that although industry is being strained as tight as an extended rubber band, we cannot yet afford the luxury of thinking that Germany is about to blow up like a bursting ack-ack shell.
The big five
Read this explanation of how the five men of the “Magic Circle,” the five warlords, have set up their organization – and realize the kind of experts with whom we are dealing.
The five men are: Speer, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Undersecretary Körner (manager of Göring’s Four Year Plan), Field Marshal Erhard Milch (chief of staff of the Luftwaffe and Göring’s “honorary Aryan” and protégé) and Economic Minister Walther Funk.
They determine in what proportion available raw materials are to be divided among the fighting services and home industries, decide every question about production policy and adjust priority claims.
Under them are 11 coordination officers and distinctive units called Rings and Committees (Ringe und Ausschüsse).
The Rings deal with production and raw material, the Committees with finished articles: thus – Rings for iron, steel, electricity, wood and chemicals, but Committees for engines, ships and guns.
‘Little Hitlers’ of industry…
Appointed directly by Hitler upon Speer’s or Göring’s recommendation, members of the Committees are able to do anything they please subject only to appeal to Hitler – afterwards. They can take over whole factories at a moment’s notice; they can confiscate and commandeer at will, unhampered by red tape or bureaucracy.
Always at their disposal are airplanes, autos and motorcycle escorts.
These are the “Little Hitlers” in German industry: Röchling and Krupp for steel; Blücher for electricity; Hahne, Porsche and Roland for panzers; Heinkel, Messerschmitt and Dornier for aircraft. These are the men, working under direction of the “Magic Circle” autocrats, who have to keep the German armies fighting by substituting rapid results for red tape.
Supposing Rommel or his chief in France, Gen. Karl Gerd von Rundstedt, decide, for instance, that the Germans cannot compete with some new Allied tank. What happens then is simple enough, the way Fritz Todt foresaw it long ago, the way the “Magic Circle” carries it out.
Rommel’s demand is approved by the Central Planning Committee – the big five – then handed along immediately without confusion of paperwork to the Speer Ministry. Promptly it reaches the armaments delivery office, which stamps it “SS Unmittelbar Heeresbedarf” …urgent army requirement… and turned it over to the chief of the panzer committee.
The panzer committee obtains the necessary raw materials from the Speer Ministry and the job is underway in a matter of hours after the desired model has been drawn up. When Rommel’s new tanks are ready, the armaments delivery office arranges transportation to the front. No more red tape than that.
Hanns Kerrl, as president of the Speer Planning Office, is second only to Speer himself in the ministry. Once the big five have made their decisions, Kerrl translates them into action.
Types simplified
Simplification of industrial types has been one big achievement.
For example, locomotives in Germany today have 978 fewer parts than in 1941. Factories, of course, are obliged to exchange patents and production secrets.
This system has worked and worked amazingly well… one million tons of oil yearly for the fighting forces, 450 U-boats maintained and another 125 building, steel production raised from 20 million tons in 1937 to between 45 and 50 million tons in the spring of 1943.
Then came Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Essen – the Battle of the Ruhr… then the smashing of the Möhne and Eder Dams… then the U.S. 8th Air Force daylight raids in ever-intensified force against aircraft factories and ball-bearing plants and against dozens of Speer Ministry links in Fritz Todt’s industrial empire.
Steel production is now down to 30 million tons yearly. Ruhr Valley production of guns and tanks is well below the 30% previous level. Transportation grows worse after every Allied raid.
On the home front, the big five are stripping the country bare in a desperate effort to find scrap metal for feeding the hungry maws of the blast furnaces. Lampposts, iron railings, autos and even yacht keels are being confiscated. The loss of the Nikopol manganese deposits, the East Ukraine coal fields and now Turkish chrome, and the reduced Spanish wolfram add no brightness to the German industrial picture.
Germany has reserves today as it awaits invasion – how much only a few know. But accumulated reserves are in peril. The empire has its saturation point as it nears its final struggle inside the Atlantic Wall.
TOMORROW: Mr. Barrows tells how Hitler and his cohorts are making their own post-war plans.
Italian soprano creates sensation here with perfect rendition of famous Aria
Hilde Reggiani cheered at Mosque performance
…
Hannegan denies any Dewey smear
Claims criticism was objective
New York –
Robert E. Hannegan, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, denied today that his address at the Jackson Day dinner castigating Governor Thomas E. Dewey was in any way intended as a “smear” of the leading Republican presidential contender.
Mr. Hannegan said in an interview today:
I felt that as long as I was speaking in New York, I should dwell on Governor Dewey’s record and his qualifications for the Presidency. I don’t think anything I said can be considered a “smear.”
Wrote own speech
Mr. Hannegan admitted that Charles Michelson, known as an astute political manipulator and often charged with engineering “smear campaigns” in the past, was taking an active part in the preconvention drive of the Democrats, but denied that Mr. Michelson was the author of the speech the national chairman made at the Hotel Commodore dinner.
He said:
I consulted with several people about my speech. But I wrote it myself.
Mr. Hannegan said that he was convinced that for the welfare of the country and of the Democratic Party the President must run for a fourth term. In reply to a question that if the war was won this year, would the President feel obligated to remain in power to insure a victory in the peace conference. Mr. Hannegan declared, “That might be a different story. He refused to enlarge on his point.”
The national chairman reiterated assertions made in his address last night that he had not discussed with the President his own desires or intentions with regard to the presidential race this year.
He said:
But in my trips through the country, I have talked with all kinds of people and they are unanimous in demanding the fourth term.
Mr. Hannegan declined to comment on assertions made by Harrison E. Spangler, chairman of the Republican National Committee, that the speech here Tuesday night was the opening barrage in the fourth-term drive.
Nazis fooled Anzio invaders by delayed counterattack
Germans brought forces from North Italy, southern France and even Russia
By John Lardner, North American Newspaper Alliance
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For greater safety –
Railroad tests of radio are planned here
Uncle Sam watches experiments
By Si Steinhauser
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Special form needed for baby’s allowance
Proof of birth must accompany application
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U.S. Navy Department (May 12, 1944)
Communiqué No. 520
Pacific and Far East.
U.S. submarines have reported the sinking of fourteen vessels, including one combatant ship, as a result of operations against the enemy in these waters, as follows:
- 1 destroyer
- 1 large tanker
- 1 medium tanker
- 1 medium transport
- 1 medium cargo transport
- 7 medium cargo vessels
- 1 small cargo transport
- 1 small cargo vessel
These actions have not been announced in any previous Navy Department communiqué.
CINCPAC Press Release No. 397
For Immediate Release
May 12, 1944
Better than 7 to 1 – that’s the ratio the Navy’s carrier squadron have established during the past eight months: 1,229 Japanese aircraft destroyed at a cost of 164 U.S. planes. A large proportion of the crews of these 164 aircraft were rescued.
The score begins with the Marcus Island raid on September 1 last year, and includes our second big raid on Truk on the last two days of April. It does not include our own comparatively light losses at Truk and during the Hollandia landings on April 21. Nor does it include 54 Japanese craft shot down by task force anti-aircraft fire.
To achieve this better than 7 to 1 superiority in aircraft destruction, our carrier-squadrons wiped out 673 Japanese planes in aerial combat, and smashed 556 on the ground. All this was in addition to great losses and damage inflicted on enemy ships and installations.
The escort carrier LISCOME BAY (CVE-56), sunk by a submarine torpedo, was the only ship lost during 19 major raids against 15 enemy bases by these big carrier task forces which ranged from the Solomons to Marcus, from the Marshalls to the Marianas and Palau.
Figures released today mirror the increasing effectiveness of these forces. Only seven planes, all on the ground, were destroyed in the September 1 thrust at Marcus. But at Truk in February, 205 Japanese craft were demolished in the air and on the ground. In the 10‑week period since the initial assault on the Truk bastion, the carrier units accounted for 719 enemy craft, more than half the total for the eight‑month period.
Indicative of our increasing ascendancy in the air, at least in the area of the Japanese outer island defenses, is the fact that in the occupation of Kwajalein Atoll enemy air opposition was eliminated within four hours after the first fighter sweep. Further, at Truk in February, not a single Japanese plane rose to challenge our aviators on the second day.
CINCPAC Press Release No. 398
For Immediate Release
May 12, 1944
Single search planes of Fleet Air Wing Two bombed landing strips at Kusaie Island and at Murilo in the Hall Islands on May 10 (West Longitude Date).
Mitchell bombers of the 7th Army Air Force attacked Ponape Island on May 10.
Enemy‑held objectives in the Marshalls were bombed on May 10 by Mitchells of the 7th Army Air Force, Ventura search planes of Fleet Air Wing Two, and Corsair fighters of the Fourth Marine Aircraft Wing. Anti-aircraft batteries, building areas, and underground shelters were hit.
CINCPAC Press Release No. 399
For Immediate Release
May 12, 1944
Two flights of 7th Army Air Force Liberators bombed Truk Atoll before dawn on May 11 (West Longitude Date). Sixty‑two tons of bombs were dropped. Airfields were hit and explosions and fires observed. Seven enemy planes intercepted the first flight of Liberators and one of these enemy planes was shot down. One of four enemy aircraft intercepting the second flight was probably destroyed. All of our planes returned.
A single Liberator of the 7th Army Air Force bombed Ponape Island before dawn on May 11.
Address by Rep. Clare Boothe Luce (R-CT)
May 12, 1944
Delivered before the Union League of Philadelphia
On March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams wrote John Adams, then in the Continental Congress. Here is a paragraph from the letter of a lady whose husband was to become the second President of the United States:
“I long,” she wrote, “to hear that you have established an Independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands… If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or representation. That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute.”
John Adams probably never dared to dispute anything with his strong-minded Abigail – not while he stood in the same room with her, anyway. But a reading of history shows that many of our revolutionary foremothers shared Abigail’s convictions about putting unlimited power into the hands of mere husbands. Perhaps this explains why, when drafting the Constitution, their somewhat cowed but still unbowed husbands found it wise, in the interests of domestic tranquility, to circumvent the whole man-woman question. Nowhere in that document does the word “man” or “woman,” in the generic sense appear once. “People,” “citizens” and “persons” were the artful ambiguities by which our Founding Forefathers sought to dodge the revolutionary demands of their helpmates. For 133 years after the signing of the Constitution, the ladies continued patiently to demand clarification of this unsemantic language, which while not lumping them outright with idiots, drunkards and criminals, still served to perpetuate the tyranny of their lords and masters at the ballot box. In 1920, their patience expired with a bang, and they did finally foment Abigail’s rebellion. The Suffrage Amendment cleared the air, and all America’s ladies thereafter had a voice and representation in the laws by which they were bound.
Now I gather, that I am the first woman invited to address this League in its long and distinguished history. It is therefore plain that this League has held out against the gentle but determined spirit of Abigail just 24 years longer than the whole United States government. In view of such naughtiness, I would be betraying, not only my sex, but the Constitution itself, if I were to stand here and tell you that I am proud to be here as the “first woman” to address you. Feeling as I do, which is as Abigail did 168 years ago, about the contribution that American women have to make in public affairs, I would be naturally more honored if I were the 24th woman to give you the full benefit of her mind about the untidy mess that the majority sex in government, the male sex, has long made of matters.
And now, ladies, we’ve gotten all the tyrannical husbands in this room whittled down to size of poor John Adams when he jogged home from the last Constitutional Convention to face the eye of his Abigail, which certainly saw right through him.
So I can go on to say, that just as a person, as a citizen, and as a legislator, I am infinitely honored to address the Union League of Philadelphia. For this League was formed by men of exceptional vision and integrity at the time of the greatest crisis which ever faced our country. The roster of your speakers shines with the most deathless names in modern American history. I am indeed proud to be numbered among the least of those who have shared for an evening in your great traditions.
I have been asked to talk tonight about the search for an American foreign policy. Frankly, I fear that on this subject, either as a woman, a person, or a legislator, I have little to say that you will not have heard or read before. How could it be otherwise?
Since the outbreak of the war in Europe, rivers of ink have been spilled in discussing America’s foreign policy. Before 1941, the great argument revolved around those two words “isolation” and “intervention.” Pearl Harbor made that argument clearly academic. To be sure, the argument about, “going in” or “staying out” was academic months before Pearl Harbor. We were in, not because we were attacked; because we were already in, on the sides of Great Britain and China. Pre-Pearl Harbor Lend-Lease to China and Great Britain, and economic sanctions applied to their enemies, were acts of war clearly understood by the Axis, however much misunderstood they were by the American people.
This misunderstanding was deepened during the 1940 election by an administration which presented these acts of war as measures calculated to keep the peace. In any case, the flood of words about America’s foreign policy, past and future, was in nowise abated by the Axis declaration of war on us. Indeed, it rose higher. And tempers rose with it. Fiercest, of course, was the fight in the political arena where seats for Congress are won or lost and where the Diamond Belt of the Presidency is contended for. Politicians, egged on by press and radio, bawled and shouted, howled and hissed, flayed, blasted, lashed and struck out at one another in the most mephitic verbiage, as they sought to fix the whole blame for our past foreign policy on one party or one politician within it. Through this brawl, the sensitive ear caught the sound of many a dull thud, as the statesmen landed their blackjack blows, in the muffled language of diplomacy, seeking to fix the credit for a future foreign policy.
From the day war was declared, many patriotic Americans deplored this inter- and intraparty Kilkenny catfight, as an indecent display of national disunity. They prophesied that it would demoralize the war effort, and compromise the peace effort. Events have proved them wholly wrong. For, in a free national discussion of international issues, no matter how fierce and partisan the discussion may become, the salient facts always emerge. And when Americans know the facts, they generally unite upon an interpretation of them.
Today, most Americans see that if we had held aloof, in strict neutrality, Germany would have conquered Europe and perhaps destroyed Great Britain, and Japan would have destroyed China and conquered Asia at her leisure. And they see that the domination of the Atlantic and the Pacific would have been a catastrophe, if not for us, for our children.
And they see far more clearly than they did after World War I that the only safe way for America to stay out of a war which involves all the major powers of Europe and Asia, is to prevent such a war. They see that in order to prevent such a war, our government must use continuously in peace, the threat of our military power, the weight of our economic power, and the good offices of our diplomatic power, all in lively cooperation with other friendly nations. Americans see, as the men of Monroe’s day, and Jefferson’s day, and Theodore Roosevelt’s day, and Woodrow Wilson’s day saw, that our nation can never be secure unless we do our strategic, economic and diplomatic thinking on a worldwide scale.
We see that our failure to do so, for the past quarter of a century, a period which included eight years of the present administration, has cost us untold life and treasure. Lord Vansittart may well have been writing the New Deal’s epitaph when he said:
If one can’t get one’s foreign policy straight, the wealth of effort spent on social policies is wasted.
The great casualty in the battle of words since 1939 was not national unity, but the two unrealistic words which started the battle: “isolation” and “intervention.” They have been slain, one hopes forever, by a new word: “Participation.” This is not a Democratic word, nor even a Republican word – though Republicans first began to use it. It is an American word. Today America’s foreign policy keyword is “participation,” the participation of our nation in the affairs of the world, in order to safeguard our position in it.
Mr. Willkie, Governor Stassen, Governor Bricker, Governor Dewey – leading Republicans who have been discussed for the Presidency – do not differ with one another or with Mr. Roosevelt that America henceforth must assume an active international role commensurate with her title of the world’s leading power, if she is to maintain that title.
This unanimity, arrived at largely through free national discussion, has been achieved, thank God, before the invasion. We are on the eve of what is perhaps the costliest and most delicate military operation in history. America will suffer greatly in the months ahead. We do not yet know how deeply she will suffer. But in those homes which will be left stricken by the invasion, parents will know that their heroic sons died not only to defend their nation today, but to teach their nation its most valuable lesson: Participation is the price of security tomorrow.
I have already indicated that our recent acceptance of American participation in world affairs is not something new in our history. On the contrary, it is a return to our historic policy.
Let me quote from a letter Thomas Jefferson sent in 1823 to President Monroe, at a time when the Holy Alliance on the European continent was making threatening gestures towards this hemisphere, and Great Britain was offering her help, albeit for reasons of her own national security, in the shape of a military alliance. This letter of Jefferson’s led to the adoption of what since has come to be known as the “Monroe Doctrine.”
In these parlous circumstances, Jefferson wrote:
Great Britain is the nation which can do us the most harm of anyone, or all on earth; and with her on our side we need not fear the whole world. With her then, we should most sedulously cherish a cordial friendship; and nothing would tend more to knit our affections than to be fighting once more, side by side, in the same cause. Not that I would purchase even her amity at the price of taking part in her wars. But the war in which the present proposition might engage us, should that be its consequence, is not her war, but ours. Its object is to introduce and establish the American system, of keeping out of our land all foreign powers, of never permitting those of Europe to intermeddle with the affairs of our nations… And if, to facilitate this, we can effect a division in the body of European powers, and draw over to our side its most powerful member, surely we should do it… With Great Britain withdrawn from their scale and shifted into that of our hemisphere all Europe combined would not undertake such a war. For how would they propose to get at us without superior fleets?
Although Jefferson counseled it, and Monroe was well disposed to it, in order not to antagonize overtly other European powers, we did not sign an alliance with Great Britain. But in effect, Monroe secured an assurance of an off-the-record alliance. This off-the-record alliance alone made it possible for him to propound the Monroe Doctrine. An Anglo-American participation was just as firmly embedded in the terms of the Monroe Doctrine, as the ladies were embedded in the word “persons” in the Constitution, though unhappily it took 150 years, and an amendment to the Constitution to clarify that fact. Unhappily, it has taken two world wars to clarify the fact to Americans that the Monroe Doctrine was a document based on the theory of our active participation on the side of a friendly European power, when an unfriendly European power, strong enough to dominate the Atlantic, threatened either of us.
Participation is also a return to the foreign policy of Elihu Root and John Hay and President Taft and Theodore Roosevelt. At the turn of the century, these statesmen participating, at a diplomatic level, in the struggle for power in the Orient after the Boxer Rebellion, followed Thomas Jefferson’s advice closely. By demanding, and getting a free China, by snatching her from the maws of every ravenous European and Asiatic major power who sought to partition her, they drew over to our side the Orient’s potentially most powerful member. That vigorous act of participation is today paying this nation dividends in the Orient. Fifty years ago, Hay, Root, Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt had a far more lively appreciation of the importance of American participation in the Orient than our present government seemed to have until one short year before Pearl Harbor.
Indeed, it is interesting to remember that in 1897, long, long before the airplane became a major weapon, Theodore Roosevelt wrote a letter to Adm. Mahan, expressing the fear that Japan might one day launch a surprise attack on Hawaii, and asking him how this contingency could best be prepared for militarily.
However, there is no need to review the case against handling of our foreign policy the last quarter of a century at great length. It can be made very briefly: The prime object of any peaceful nation’s foreign policy is to maintain the security of the nation from attack. If the nation is attacked, and its position seriously endangered, the custodians of its foreign policy have failed. The present custodian had two terms in office to implement our foreign policy so that we would be secure against attack. We were attacked. And in two oceans. This was the greatest foreign policy failure in our history to date. The very measure of it was the size of the attack, and the cost to our nation: So far 180,000 casualties and an estimated $200 billion. Nor is the end of it in sight for us.
Neither is it profitable to fight, to quibble with the legal mechanics and immediate objectives of our present foreign policy. This would be an effort to read lessons in day-to-day diplomacy to those who possess facts which are not available to anybody but the High Commands in Washington, London and Moscow.
What I want to discuss tonight is America’s foreign policy – not the New Deal’s or the Republican Party’s foreign policy. I mean, our foreign policy for the imaginable future. That is to say, for about the next quarter of a century, of the lifetime of our children. Such a discussion transcends many of the foreign policy issues which will be evoked during the next election. It transcends even the question of whether the next President should be a Democrat or a Republican. It concerns, not men and women who are Republicans or Democrats first, but men and women who are Americans first: yourselves, for example.
We know that the keyword is participation. No longer do Americans discuss if we should participate. The area of discussion is how we should participate – to what extent? And what are the objectives and yardsticks of participation for the future?
But before we go into that long-range discussion, let us consider momentarily one fact that has been astonishingly characteristic of all American thinking since Stalingrad, and since it became plain that the Japanese could not take Australia or Hawaii. The fact is this: since then, all Americans have at all times been certain of victory. The very fury of our debates on the post-war era proves that we know, in our bones, as the expression goes, we are certain to beatdown our enemies to whatever point we consider will assure us of military victory.
Now, it is important for Americans to understand quite clearly why we believe, almost to a man, after the early days of the war, in victory over the Axis. Perhaps if we are clear in our own minds about our reasons, we will have discovered some yardsticks by which to measure our objectives in participation in the affairs of the world tomorrow.
Were we, for example, sure we would win, because as Christians, we believed God was on our side? But our side is also Russia’s, whose current notions of God differ radically from ours – indeed are largely non-existent. We know that God is always on the side of every individual soul who fights with faith in Him, but can we be sure that God is on the side of nations who have renounced Him? We know we cannot thus order divine partisanship.
Were we sure, as citizens of a great Republic, that we would win because our form of government bred tougher and more patriotic fighters than our enemies? Or offered more hope to the conquered peoples of Europe and Asia? We know, alas, the answer. Our Soviet and Chinese friends are far removed from a practice of British and American forms of democracy. Yet their fighters are quite as tough and patriotic as our own, and they have borne more of the brunt of battle. Furthermore, we are alarmingly aware that totalitarian ideology threatens everyday to make more headway in Europe and Asia than democratic ideology. Indeed, so potent and insidious is the appeal, even to some Americans, of both Fascism and Communism, that never a day goes by but what an American leaps to his feet to shout that while we are “winning” the war abroad militarily, we are in danger of “losing” it at home politically.
No, neither the dignity of our cherished libertarian principles, nor the Christian basis of our moral and intellectual values in themselves, are the reasons we hold forth for victory.
The hard and self-evident fact is that our political ideals, and spiritual visions have survived this war only because they have been supported, in time, by sheer brute force, by a tangible material strength in excess of that of our enemies. Not our faith in the validity of our ideals, but our knowledge of the strength of our arms, is the true basis of our certainty of victory.
We know, always knew, we would win because we knew we had preponderant physical power on our side. Let us analyze that power.
First, we have machine power: As Mr. Stalin has amiably noted, American production genius – our skilled working men, our superior management, our brilliant scientists and technologists, manipulating one of the world’s greatest national sources of raw materials and commodities – have outproduced our enemies. Today, American production, packed into ships, planes and guns, is delivering the greatest wallop-power in all history. And our American machine-production power has richly increased by that of Great Britain, particularly by her machine power at sea.
Secondly, we are winning because, on our side, we have preponderant manpower: The prodigious manpools of Russia and China. While Great Britain’s and America’s air and sea power continuously patrols and bombards the heart and occupied Rimlands of Asia and Europe, the two great land armies of our Chinese and Russian allies, driving out from the interior of Europe and Asia, squeeze our enemies down to the mouths of our naval cannons.
Predominate Anglo-American machine power, plus predominate Chinese and Russian manpower, are today the two great factors in licking the Axis, though both manpower and machine power have been richly supplemented, of course, by the resources and cooperation of our South American and other allies.
It is imperative to bear these facts of manpower and machine power in mind quite clearly when we think of our future foreign policy.
Now here are some statistics on manpower, which we have seen has been one great determinate of victory. This is the way world manpower, i.e., population is distributed:
USA 6% South America 4% The Commonwealth (and British Isles) 3% All European nations 18% Soviet Russia 8% China 21% India 16% Japan 4% In terms of manpower America today is not in a superior position. It is no accident that the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoon of the year was one depicting our war manpower troubles and shortages.
Therefore, we Americans must count our strength, as a major power, in some other way. Of course we do. We know that our strength lies in our raw materials and commodities and in our capitalistic productive system, and in our knowhow by which our nation has, in two world wars, fashioned enough mobile machine striking power to beat our enemies over vast distances. But let us consider our power ratio in those physical resources deemed essential to conducting a modern war.
Of such materials the…
USA owns South America 8% British Isles and the Commonwealth 7% European nations 8% Russia 23% China 10% India 10% Japan 4% Great Britain’s colonial possessions 6% European colonial possessions 7% A normally intelligent child could tell you that, if our nation, with only six percent of the world’s population and 16 percent of its resources, were ever attacked by a combination of major European and Asiatic powers, and could find no allies, we would be wiped off the map as a free nation. Even with loyal South America, and with Great Britain and the Commonwealth fighting beside us, we would have tough going. For the power situation has changed since Jefferson’s day, although his principles of power still hold true.
Asia and Europe have industrialized greatly since the time when the British could throw a throttling lariat of ocean-borne machine power around the continents. The manpower and machine power of nations are not constants. The populations of India, Russia, China, the Big Three, in the heart of Eurasia, are growing by leaps and bounds. Their industrial knowhow is increasing almost as rapidly as Japan’s did during the last century. Nothing stands between the ability of Russia and China to industrialize on a Western scale but the time to lick their terrible war wounds – and to acquire some blueprints. Blueprints for railroads, refineries, factories, battleships, and airplanes. And India, too, is a nation slated for great industrial expansion. Yes, there are mighty nations aborning in the world – none so mighty as we today, but possibly tomorrow.
Only 50 short years ago, this nation was a secondary military power. But when this war is done, America will emerge as the military Titan of the world. We will have a navy two and a half times bigger than that of the British. We will have the greatest air force in the world. Our factories will be tuned up to such pitch that we can supply, if we will, not only our whole nation with every consumer commodity imaginable, but some of devastated Europe and Asia to boot. Our rapid industrialization has elevated us to the pinnacle upon which the might of a modern nation rests: its ability, while maintaining high living standards, to manufacture and deliver, buy and sell in times of peace a vast volume of the multiple goods of commerce, and in times of war, rapidly to deliver decisive striking power.
But as that power rose and developed unmolested for 150 years in an ocean world, largely because of a friendly British Navy, so it can fall if we do not protect it. Our future security will depend on our own ability, at all times, to maintain a preponderance of physical power sufficient to defend ourselves, against any combination of resurgent enemies which may arise against us. To discourage and forestall, by ardent and effective statesmanship, the rise of unfriendly combinations of powers anywhere in the world, should be the primary objective of American participation in the affairs of Asia and Europe. But in forestalling and discouraging the aggressive spirit in other nations, as Jefferson knew and Theodore Roosevelt knew, nothing is more effective than the encouragement of and association with friendly ones.
With such we should “most sedulously cherish a cordial friendship.” We must bind them to our side, be it by unilateral, or by multilateral methods, by alliances, or better still within what is today called “some system of collective security.” In the column of our friends – who must always be defined as those willing to fight by our side and one another’s if the vital interests of any are endangered – we must number nations such as China and Russia, whose manpower can supplement our own woeful shortage, whose raw materials and commodities will supplement our lack, and, wherever possible, whose ideals of government have the same moral basis as our own. For as we have seen, the yardsticks by which we must participate in the world’s affairs are the alignments of manpower, machine power, and moral power on the sides of the peaceful nations.
Some of you are no doubt thinking, yes, we understand those manpower and machine power yardsticks, but what about the yardsticks of geography? Is geography no longer a factor in the security of nations? Does geography no longer give our hemisphere some measure of immunity from aggression? Are our three oceans, after all, no longer beneficent barriers? If we stay strong and tough and armed to the teeth behind our oceans, will we not be safe from attack from Europe, Asia, or across the Pole? The answer, so far as oceanography goes, is yes and no. Yes, if we and our friends command the trading and striking surfaces of our oceans; no, if the command of them should slip away from us.
It has always been an American fiction, of course, that these were multiple oceans. A hundred years before Wendell Willkie emphasized to Americans that it was One World, the British had emphasized to all of Europe and Asia that it was One Ocean. They commanded the One Ocean of the World, purposefully collecting an empire with battleships, but spreading willy-nilly civilization in the bottoms of their trade ships. Eventually, however, the train on tracks caught up with the ship on the sea, as a carrier of traders and warriors. Vast continental land masses were swiftly united by railroads. And then, across the land’s surface, on wheels, as across the sea’s surface on bottoms, rapidly transported men with guns began to blast away at one another, and also at the battleship boys who had settled on the rims of their continents. Once on wheels, manpower and raw materials became as effective in war and peace as manpower and raw materials on bottoms.
But for one factor in this war, German mobile land power might have conquered all Europe, and also knocked British sea power off the rim of that continent for keeps. That factor was airpower.
For this is the great new fact of this era: this one-land-world, this one-ocean-world, is totally encircled and contained within a one-air-world. The air provides a new surface on which man can now travel and trade or deal death and destruction, which goes all around the globe, and over the land and over the sea. It annihilates typography and oceanography. It circumvents all geography.
Any strong combination of aggressive nations which has the blueprints to build long-range transports and bombers, and the assembly belts to build them on, and a disciplined population to man the belts and the planes, can fly forth great armies whose only concern with geography will be to ascertain what big city in what continent they had best pulverize first. In an air world, allies are to be sought less and less for their precise geographical positions and more and more for their manpower and industrial and moral ones.
It was because I felt so keenly the terrible potentialities of airpower in the hands of aggressive nations, that I dared to raise my voice as a freshman Congressman over a year ago on this question. I urged Americans to remain strong in the air after the war, to maintain our air supremacy as we intend to maintain our naval supremacy. I said months and months ago that it would be folly to internationalize all sky space, as some members of the administration were then urging upon us. However free we are with it to our friends, we must control the air space above our own nation, if we are to protect ourselves effectively against our enemies. International air is only possible or safe under an international government and a world state. Although I was bitterly attacked at the time for saying so, as you all remember, the position I took is now generally accepted throughout the nation.
To recapitulate, the primary objective of future U.S. foreign policy must be to bind a constellation of peace-loving, well-populated, industrialized nations together in order to discourage and forestall the rise of aggressive, well-populated, industrialized power combinations either in Asia or Europe. In this effort, we must show particular concern for the South American nations and the smaller nations of the world. For what was once a moral inclination of this nation – to protect the small peace-loving nations, has now become a physical necessity. We will be most richly rewarded where we encourage democratic procedures and help to restore and animate the economies of friendly nations. For the nations, small or large, which enjoy the maximum of liberty and prosperity will naturally gravitate toward us. Nor must we forget what the British learned the hard way, after Munich, that while you can buy up small, peace-loving nations and strengthen them, you cannot buy off big, aggressive nations and weaken them.
In closing, let us remember, too, that years before we can be certain that we are pursuing a foreign policy which will ensure the security of our children, the New Dealers, and the Old Dealers as well, who claim today to be the only fit custodians of the peace, will have been garnered to the bosoms of their ancestors.
The agreements made at Moscow and Tehran and Cairo, the peace treaties that may be signed in the next few years, however just and whoever signs them, even the collective security systems to which we may shortly subscribe, will operate smoothly only so long as the major signatory nations remain content with them. No treaty or league has ever remained binding, alas, on nations who found that its strictures had become useless or disagreeable, and who were permitted to amass the force to break them.
I feel I must point out this unhappy fact. As Emerson says, “God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose.” Let those who will, repose in the false assumption, that the mere reelection or election of a President, or even the acceptance by the nations of the world next year of some written plan for post-war security, however ideal, will keep America secure for a quarter of a century.
“God’s country” is an understandable Americanism. We may well be God’s chosen nation, but it rests on us to prove it, by our wisdom in providing for the common defense, and in aiding and abetting everywhere the causes of freedom-loving and peace-loving nations. In the midst of a terrible and devastating civil war, a domestic war, that greatest of all Republicans, Abraham Lincoln said “we shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth.” His war mission was domestic, but his peace aim was international. It was to preserve a free America for mankind. He knew what a free America meant to the world. He would be the first, today, to tell us what a free world means to America.
Address by Raymond Moley of Newsweek
May 12, 1944
Delivered before the Ohio State Bar Association, Columbus, Ohio
I shall not, this evening, carry coals to Newcastle or law to Columbus. My interests concern only those places where law touches politics. I want to discuss politics, in its so-called classical sense, and to make not a political speech, but a speech about politics.
In what I have to say, I want to lay down a few broad propositions about politics in this country and, in elaborating upon them, to draw a few conclusions of current importance. I do this in no merely partisan sense but, rather, in the spirit of one who, before the shooting starts next month, would examine some of the fundamentals which lie beneath all party policy in this country. For there are principles in politics, and, while no body of knowledge which concerns to closely the inscrutable recesses of human nature can be wholly scientific, politics is truly an art – a great art and a very old art.
There is little in its fundamentals that was not clearly foreshadowed in Aristotle and in the great followers of Aristotle through the ages. What is more, there is little of danger in the immediate choices before us in this country that the ancients failed to see. In fact, the more I think of our basic constitutional law and of principles of our government, the more I realize how much the statesmen who established these principles drew their inspiration from the immortal wisdom of Aristotle.
The first political proposition which I wish to discuss is the inevitability of a two-party system under our Constitution. There may be many contributing reasons why we have had only two major parties at a time since the beginning, but we can find the basic reason in the nature of the Constitution itself. It is the Constitution of a federal republic – a commonwealth of commonwealths. The federal character of the government it set up is indicated by its provisions for representation in Congress, for the election of the President, for the distribution of powers and in other ways. The anatomy of a national party follows, of necessity, the structural outlines of the republic Since a major party must, from time to time, elect a President and a majority in Congress, it is hard to imagine how more than two major parties could create and maintain organizations in forty-eight states. For that matter, it is hard to see how more than two major parties could maintain organizations in three thousand counties and more thousands of smaller units. At any rate, by and large, the two-party system has met the pragmatic test. Ithas lived a century and a half. It has resisted all efforts to change it into a multi-party system. So-called third parties have, in their short lives, provided little more than occasional inspiration or irritation or the opportunity for shrewd political blackmail.
My second proposition is that the essential vitality of our parties in the past has sprung from the wide distribution of their control. Since they have roots in so many political subdivisions, they are, of necessity, essentially dependent upon the loyalties and the efforts of a million or more minor party workers. In the great number of these multitudinous minor party officers lies one of the greatest of protections of our party system and of our republican form of government. They are too numerous to be regimented by a single, national general-staff. There are too many of them to be bribed or corrupted. The very multitude of the interests with which they are in contact is the surest protection we have against the capture of the national party by any one interest or faction.
It has been fashionable for some of us to sneer at these lesser party chieftains and workers. They are, it is said, benighted, wholly indifferent to large issues and perspectives. They are often venal. But whoever quarrels with their shortcomings is quarreling with human life. As a group, they do perform a profoundly important function in the maintenance of popular government. Without them, our national and state elections would be subject to certain capricious forces which I shall presently mention and which, if unchecked, would destroy the republic itself.
My third proposition is that the idea of so-called executive leadership of a party, while it envisages certain of the essential requirements necessary to truly national unity, may also open the way to potential infections of the body politic of a most malignant nature. We have seen both aspects of it – the good and the bad – appear in their most insidious forms in the past fifty years. Forceful figures like Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt have exploited the concept of executive leadership in a spectacular manner. The theory of executive leadership has a seductive quality, which makes its dangers difficult to comprehend. Woodrow Wilson, four years before his election to the Presidency, expressed it thus:
The President is at liberty, both in law and conscience to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit; and if Congress be overborne by him, it will be no fault of the makers of the Constitution – it will be from no lack of constitutional powers on his part, but only because the President has the nation behind him, and Congress has not.
Wilson says further that Presidents will, as time passes, regard themselves “less and less executive officers and more and more directors of affairs and leaders of the nation.”
Thus, he concluded that the President may, if he will, become “national boss through the use of his enormous patronage, doling out his local gifts of place to local party managers, in return for support and cooperation in the guidance and control of his party… He can break party lines apart and draw together combinations of his own devising.”
These words, it should be noted, were uttered by a vigorous man who had not yet experienced in political office the dreadful effects of power upon the men who exercised such power. He assumed, as all highly theoretical and righteous men assume, that a man vested with such power will lose none of his earlier capacity to restrain his own ambition. Lincoln retained that capacity, but his example is exceptional. And in Mr. Wilson’s second term, Mr. Wilson showed less and less of Lincoln’s humble faith in the people and more and more faith in himself. When Mr. Wilson wrote the words I have quoted, he knew nothing of his local party organization, was wholly unacquainted with his state party leaders, read no New Jersey paper and rarely voted in local elections. It is further worthy of note that after eight years of trying out his theory of Presidential leadership, his party’s organization had fallen into the most dreadful state of weakness that it had seen for a generation.
We have had another experience with the theory of presidential leadership in the past eleven years. We have seen party authority sapped by centrally-controlled government patronage. We have seen the Democratic National Committee so weakened that many of its members are in open revolt, while many others are in silent and impotent opposition. We have seen the last Chairman who truly represented the rank and file of the Party forced, by his own conscience, into irreconcilable retirement. We have seen him followed in quick succession by three presidential puppets. We have seen a presidential favorite, much of whose previous party affiliation was with the Socialist Party, give orders to the humiliated but obedient Democratic Convention.
We have seen more. We have seen the high officers of the Congress – the Speaker and the Majority Leaders of both Houses – serve not as officers of the Houses that elected them, but as agents of the Executive. We have heard out of his own mouth the Majority Leader of the Senate say that for years he has carried the President’s flag in the Senate. We have seen the majority of the Senate accept his resignation from that office and, then, reelect him, thus registering the humiliating fact that, for eleven years, their elected Leader was in reality the President’s agent. This is the principle of executive leadership degenerating into the actuality of party dictatorship.
I am not arguing that leadership is not inevitable, as long as human nature is human nature. I am simply pointing out that, without restraints, leadership can, under certain conditions, ultimately operate to destroy the foundations of. party and, in turn, the foundations of republican government.
When, however, we find political leadership falling a victim to perversion, the reasonable course is to seek the causes of that perversion, rather than to abandon faith in leadership itself. As I see it, one of the two sources of danger lies in certain more or less mechanical factors in modern life: the other lies in the psychology of the leader himself.
Modern methods of communication, such as the radio, and modern forms of influencing opinion, such as motion pictures and national publications, lend to the purposes of ambition the means of imposing ideologies from the top down and of supervening or overcoming the traditional method through which political authority moves from the bottom upward. We have had recent examples of the power, the successes and, fortunately, in some cases, the failures of such operations. Such efforts are almost invariably aimed at weakening party organization. They make their strongest appeal on the ground that local party leaders are too dumb to know what is good for the country.
The other force that corrupts the principle of true leadership springs from the psychology of the leader himself. Power corrupts every faculty of the mind, especially judgment. As ambition augments the means of power, it also reduces the faculties that govern the use of that power.
No one who has seen an executive at work over a long period has failed to see that as his power increases, he has less access to the true facts or true opinions of those who see him. In the crowded day of a President of the United States, almost every caller wants something. Those necessitous visitors are not going to say unpleasant things, however true. The President’s comments and opinions are greeted with enthusiastic acquiescence. After some years of this, the President may think things are true merely because he says them. The windows of an Executive’s mind have a way of slamming shut. The draft that closes them comes, from the mouths of courtiers, and the thing that keeps them shut is the honeyed glue of flattery. Just when an Executive needs most a clear view of his domain, he finds himself gazing into the pictures on his office wall instead of out of the windows of his office.
This brings me to my fourth and last proposition. Political parties in the United States, because of their wide base, have been compelled to universalize their policies. Their lines cutting, as they have, at something like right angles to the lines which divide social, economic or religious groups, they have been forced to adhere more or less closely to some concept of a national interest transcending all group interests.
There are some instances when hypocrisy is a virtue. One of them is illustrated by the tendency in party platforms and speeches to pretend to a universality of interest and sympathy. These pretentions, however insincere, have in the past kept class antagonisms out of political campaigns. All of you who have lived in Cleveland know the expression attributed to a ward leader there: “I know no race; I know no religion; I know no class. I know nothing.”
But it should be added that all such pretensions of universality are not, in essence, hypocritical. Such expressions actually do represent an aspiration for a political loyalty which conceives of the state as a common partnership, a fellowship of men and women, centered in a true concept of general welfare.
I do not claim that parties have not, from time to time, been the preys of an excess of special interest of one kind or another. But, in the main, they have sought to be a just instrument for the government of all people, rather than tools of one group or bloc. One party might include, as Theodore Roosevelt estimated, only 35 percent of organized labor or 65 percent of the farmer vote.
But when the party line is bent so far away from cutting group lines at right angles as to come in conformity with those lines, there is danger both to parties and the nation. It is not reassuring to read that 80 or 85 percent oi the CIO favors one party; nor is it reassuring to read a recent poll in which business management favors one party to the tune of ninety percent.
In alluding once more to my contention that there is a national interest supreme over all other interests, permit me to remind this group of lawyers of what has been happening to the constitutional concept of the “general welfare” under the new order of things. Apparently, sociologists are interpreting a Constitution written by philosophers. Plato yearned for the day when philosophers would be statesmen. But he never anticipated the oddity which would be presented when social reformers occupied the seats of statesmen.
The expression “general welfare” was put into the Constitution by men who knew the great principles of political philosophy. They learned their classical philosophy with their law. The law taught to Jefferson, Marshall, Monroe and Clay by George Wythe was not a hodgepodge of folk dancing and first aid. The classical concept embodied in the term “general welfare” was that of a welfare which transcended all little welfares. The adding together of the attributes of a thousand individual private rights does not explain the total importance of a national interest. An atoll in the Caroline Islands may be created by billions of coral animals, but it is not for the possession of their skeletons that men fight and die for a foothold there. Obviously, there can be no national security even after we have made the most precise definitions of every citizen’s security. Yet our atomic statesmanship, in these days, fails to realize that when men and classes are divided into their particular interests, a supreme interest is lost. And in the chaos that follows, all particular interests are, in turn, sacrificed.
When we break down parties in the name of some attractive concept of non-partisanship, we run squarely into the immutable facts of human association. The slogan of non-partisanship is one of the most dangerous that ever introduced itself into our national life. What it does is to seize upon all the underlying antagonisms to parties that the venal sins of these parties have lighted up and to hitch the resulting enmity to a great delusion – the delusion that there is such a thing as an independent voter. When a man cuts his ties to a party, he does not thereupon respond only to a calm and rational weighing of issues. Being a gregarious animal, he responds to other forms of group attraction. Some of these are religious, some are racial, some are social and economic Many of the pulls or attractions are wholly irrelevant to political judgment. Some, I regret to say, easily take on the kind of virulent character that breaks the community into warring groups.
I have now offered certain general propositions which are, in the main, expressions of the theory and philosophy of politics. Now, by way of illustrating what is happening, let me present some concrete evidence, drawn from the history of national parties over the past three-quarters of a century.
I use as a basis for my illustration that most convenient political unit – the Congressional district. If, from Virginia, a crescent were drawn to the southwest as far as Texas, the area on each side would include those districts which, over the years, have been most consistently Democratic. That, for our purpose, we may call the solid South. But there was, for sixty of these years, an almost equally solid North, as well. That solid North might be described as an area extending a hundred miles or so north and south of a line drawn from the place at which we are meeting tonight to the northeastern corner of Nebraska. That area was, until 1930, consistently Republican. It provided a sectional offset to the solid Democratic South. National campaigns, over the years, were fought with these two great centers of opposing power in mind and, because each was predominantly agricultural and because in the voting population the distribution of social classes, races and religions were so similar, party lines were drawn roughly at right angles with class lines.
To understand what happened in 1932, we shall have to bear two facts in mind. In the first place, because of a persistent problem of agricultural surpluses, both the southern and northern farmer were in growing revolt against the party in power. In the second place, the basic philosophy of the Democratic nominee in 1932 was largely agricultural. When Mr. Roosevelt ran twice for the State Senate in Dutchess County and, later, when he ran for Governor, his strategy, largely conceived by Louis Howe, was to direct his appeal to the farmers and small shopkeepers who were hitherto mainly Republican. That strategy succeeded. When he was nominated at Chicago, it is significant that he was opposed to the last by the delegates from industrial regions and by the city machines.
His campaign of 1932 was specifically directed at breaking into the region which I have described as the solid Republican North. He paid little attention to the cities. In his speeches, there was little about labor, nothing about social security, nothing of foreign policy and only a bare mention of relief. The philosophy he then expressed was a broad national one – one in which the interdependence of the groups was asserted over and over. And when election came, he won a national victory. For two years, some of us believed that a new, truly national and dominant party had been born. The Congressional elections of 1934 ran about the same way as the election of 1932.
Then came 1935 and, with it, a radical reversal of policy. Farm benefits were continued, but the legislation of that year and the next was designed to favor the city machines and labor. High among the new proposals were social security, the Wagner Act and enlarged relief schemes. Louie Howe and his agrarian philosophy were not only dead, but forgotten. In 1936, the President and his party sought, through an alliance with the city machines and organized labor, to bring behind them the greatest possible number of easily manipulated votes. They secured for the candidate a majority of eleven million. But underneath it all, the effects of changed policies were apparent. In 1936, Mr. Roosevelt carried fewer counties than in 1932. The new policy, superficially successful, continued. The Supreme Court was attacked. An alliance was made with the CIO. Spend-lend became not an emergency measure, but a national policy.
There were those who protested against this trend, and, may I say, I was one of them. The elections of 1938 showed the ebbing of the tide. In 1940, despite the defeat of Willkie by big city votes, the outward Democratic tide continued. In 1942, it still went on. A look at the non-urban districts held by Republicans shows that they now compare almost exactly with those held in 1924. The great power of habit has reasserted itself once more. In those districts, the Republicans are home from the sea. The Early New Deal, which died in 1935, was no more like the present philosophy of the Democratic Party than Jefferson is like Phil Murray.
Mr. Jefferson had much to say about the kind of momentous choice that Mr. Roosevelt was to make in 1935. He solemnly warned his party against it. He said that the security not only of his party, but of the nation, rested upon the farmers and others of moderate means. He said that large city groups of voters easily manipulated would become “fit tools for the designs of ambition.” He believed, with Aristotle, that vast masses of voters while they might be temporarily captured by the cry of democracy, could also become the mere transition between a government of powers distributed by geography or constitutional compartments and a government in which a single individual rules. He believed, in short, that a class government becomes, of necessity, a personal government.
Now, by way of more exact illustration, let me present a tabulation of the city Congressional districts by parties since 1924. [Illustrates with charts]
The lesson of this is that while a restoration of party balance has taken place in non-urban America, the same thing has not taken place in the cities. The Democratic Party of 1944 has concentrated strength in cities and in the South. The great middle ground is Republican. And the election this year will be a test of strength upon this dangerous division of power. That the predominantly agricultural South is not happy can be seen by any observer down there. It was shown in the veto on the President’s vote of the tax bill in February.
We have reached a point where there is real danger of the continued dominance of a party based upon economic classes. What is more, we are in danger of dominance by a party in which effective power may be seized, before long, by political labor groups. This, I submit, is a grave turn of events.
The road away from this quagmire lies in the maintenance and restoration of real party government. The Republican Party can contribute to the preservation of Republican institutions by basing its appeal upon the interdependent interests of men and women of average means, of those elements of Labor which are not dedicated to a labor political party, of the free farmers and of industrial management. It may take a great defeat to bring the Democratic Party back to the principle of group interdependence which it deserted in 1935. But, since that sort of major operation is necessary, let us not delay too long.
I have offered these observations tonight to induce the interest of thoughtful men like yourselves in the preservation of party government in the United States. I have not argued for the supremacy of one party over the other, because I believe that millions of Democrats are just as eager as anyone to restore the truly national character of their party. They, too, prefer a party to a personal government. They, too, believe that the creation of a party adhering to class lines is a long step toward personal government. They, too, deplore the stark appeals to class which have characterized the utterances of men in high office in the past few years. They, too, yearn for a government in which self-seeking groups have no part. They, too, adhere to the concept of an Executive and a Congress to which all groups may go for justice, but which no group may borrow, steal or use for its own purposes.
For when we take that high ground, our fellow-travelers are immortal men. The creators of our Constitution saw these dangers, and the more eloquent among them, like Madison, spelled out those dangers. A political party is no end in itself. But when it serves the greater end of preserving republican government, it deserves the support of Americans. The American republic is no mere figure of speech. It is a mechanism by which men may live and be free. And vital parties are the foundations upon which that republic should rest.
The Pittsburgh Press (May 12, 1944)
2,000 PLANES HIT NAZI OIL PLANTS
Atlantic Wall also raked by huge air fleet
Nazi fighters rip into Yank raiders
By Walter Cronkite, United Press staff writer
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