New York – (March 11)
Despite the fact that he was in ill health in 1940, Irvin S. Cobb campaigned vigorously for Wendell L. Willkie.
One of his statements follows:
I am supporting Wendell Willkie for President because I am a lifelong Democrat and he is the only Democrat running for President this year. There are at least 12 other reasons why I am for him – one is Madame Perkins and Harold Ickes is the other 11.
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Members of the Armed Forces who are not in the “regular components” of the Army or Navy may become candidates for political officer, but they may not solicit votes, make speeches or otherwise campaign in their own behalf. And if elected, they must leave the service. For regular officers, the regulations are even more stringent.
This old military regulation was emphasized by the President Friday in making public a joint Army-Navy agreement.
In short, when you elect a soldier or sailor to office you vote him out of the war – and the government loses all it has invested in training and equipping him. This loss is particularly heavy when it involves officers.
This is something Republicans should consider carefully in the case of Lt. James G. Fulton of Dormont, a candidate for the Republican congressional nomination in the 31st district.
Quite aside from his qualifications, Lt. Fulton voluntarily entered the Navy and has received extensive and expensive training. There is no reason to believe that he could perform in Congress more valuable service than he is now performing. Moreover, of the others entered in the same contest, several are capable men.
If Lt. Fulton wanted to run for Congress, he shouldn’t have entered the Navy. But he did so, voluntarily – receiving a commission.
Lt. Fulton attended a meeting of 31st district leaders Friday night, spoke on behalf of his candidacy and outlined some of the policies he will support if elected – this on the same day that the Army-Navy prohibition of active participation in a campaign was issued.
We predict that as the public considers this problem – particularly families with members in service – they will be extremely reluctant to vote candidates out of the war. After all, the veteran will enjoy great political advantage when the war is over – and the more who wait until then, instead of leaving now, the sooner it will end.
By Kermit McFarland
In the soldier-vote controversy now embroiling Congress, the opposing sides agree – so they say – that it is essential to provide a method by which the Armed Forces may vote in this year’s election. Both sides protest that it would be an outrage if the Armed Forces were deprived of a vote merely because of their absence from the country.
The differences on which the issue has hung, more than three months now, are based, so the antagonists say, on varied interpretations of the Constitution. Opponents of a federal ballot for the Armed Forces – necessary only in the interest of uniformity and simplification – say control of the ballot is reserved exclusively to the states by the Constitution. Advocates of the federal ballot deny this.
So far, the so-called “states’ rights” group has had the controlling hand.
Justice Stone’s opinion
But there is another authority on the Constitution – the Supreme Court of the United States.
The Supreme Court has not passed on the soldier-vote issue, as such. But in 1940, Justice Harlan F. Stone wrote an opinion which some eminent legal authorities, not engaged in the Congressional controversy, consider immediately applicated to this issue.
In this opinion, the Justice, now Chief Justice, said:
While, in a loose sense, the right to vote for representatives in Congress is sometimes spoken of as a right derived from the states, this statement is true only in the sense that the states are authorized by the Constitution to legislate on the subject… to the extent that Congress has not restricted state action by exercise of its powers to regulate elections…
Mr. Justice Stone, with the Court majority, even held that Congress could regulate primary elections.
And that is precisely what the Constitution says in Section 4 of Article I: The states may prescribe the rules, but Congress, “may at any time by law make or alter such regulations.”
This Supreme Court opinion, in the judgement of high-ranking legal authorities, effectively takes care of the issue.
Presidential electors
But the “states’ rights” lawyers in Congress probably will answer that this is applicable merely to elections involving representatives in Congress. They will point to Section 2 of Article II which says that each state shall provide the manner of choosing its own presidential electors.
And since a federal ballot would involve the election of a President and Vice President as well as Senators and Congressmen, a federal ballot, they will say, is unconstitutional.
But the states have already provided a method for choosing presidential electors, who in turn technically elect a President. And that method is the ballot. There is nothing in the Constitution which says the federal government ay not provide the ballot.
The federal ballot in no way interferes with the methods already prescribed by the states for choosing presidential electors.
And Mr. Justice Stone, in his opinion, repeated an old dictum of the Supreme Court that matters which are “appropriate” to the Constitution, which are “not prohibited” by the Constitution and which are consistent with the letter and spirit of the Constitution are constitutional.
He said:
That principle extends to the Congressional power, by appropriate legislation, to safeguard the right of choice by the people of representatives in Congress secured by Section 2 of Article I.
And Mr. Justice Douglas, in the same case, said the Constitution was “designed not only for temporary needs but for the vicissitudes of time.”
The absence of millions of voters in the Armed Forces is certainly a “vicissitude.”
By Fred W. Perkins, Press Washington correspondent
Washington –
Rev. William J. Smith, a Jesuit priest who heads the Crown Heights School of Catholic Workmen, in Brooklyn, New York, distributes his thoughts on public affairs regularly in the mimeographed Crown Heights Comment, and this writer, who has been on the mailing list for some time, finds them interesting, provocative and independent. Father Smith’s writings give the impression of a calm mind far enough removed from the daily tumult to give him an objective view of what is going on, but not far enough away to keep him from having a very good idea of what it is all about.
The latest Comment shows that Father Smith is against a fourth term for President Roosevelt. Most of his reasons are the usual ones – too much “one indispensable man” stifling of the aspirations of other capable men, corrosion of the two-party system, development of a tremendous body of government employees and governmentally-aided citizens. But he gives another reason on which he bases an opinion that the best service the President could render to the nation at this time would be “to declare himself as definitely opposed to a fourth term.”
Father Smith doesn’t say so in so many words, but this particular reason is apparently based on the obvious possibility that if Mr. Roosevelt runs again, he might be defeated. He seems to think it would be a tremendous personal tragedy for him to fail at the summit of a great career, and there might be a national tragedy as well.
Predicts ‘chaos’
If the President is nominated and defeated, writes Father Smith:
…the effect of such an event would echo around the world. Friends and enemies alike would see in it a repudiation, on the part of the American electorate, not merely of the things in the present administration against which the voters rebelled but a rejection of everything good and bad that the President has advocated at home and abroad. It would create chaos in international circles to the utter delight of our enemies with whom we are at war.
The advantages that the Roosevelt personality enjoys over his prospective political rivals are not great enough to subject the nation to such a risk.
Father Smith’s work places him in close contact with working men, and he has definite views on their place in the political picture. He writes:
The one specific segment of the population said to be overanxious for a fourth term for Mr. Roosevelt is that collection of citizens commonly described as “labor.” It is far from certain that the majority of all the working people are of such a mind. Sidney Hillman’s CIO Committee for Political Action is leaving no stone unturned to accomplish that aim. An estimated million dollars will be spent for the purpose, and a common front with any and all groups will be attempted to put across their plan.
We fear very much that the experiment may be a boomerang. It has been so in the past. The American Federation of Labor has found that it does not pay to hitch your star to the coattail of one man. John L. Lewis learned the lesson to his sorrow. He might hand over a sizable lump of the miners’ treasury, but he could not hand over the miners’ votes with the same facility.
Agrees with Dies
In some of his writings, Father Smith has shown a distaste for the methods of Rep. Martin Dies, head of the investigating committee known by his name, but the following from the Comment is not much different from what the Texas Congressman has had to say on the same subject:
Hillman’s dictatorial tendencies run along the same lines as those of Lewis, and the violent upheaval in the American Labor Party of New York City is but an indication of the reaction that occurs when freeborn American citizens are told how to vote or else. We expect just as great a rebellion from many individual voters in the CIO as has been shown by the organized Social Democrats [Socialists] in New York City.
The CIO trade unionists have no choice but to go along with the decision of the national body in contributing to the Political Action Committee in their locals. When they get into the voting booth, they will ballot as they please and they have a perfect right to do so.
Father Smith thinks the labor forces might well try to do some collective bargaining outside the Democratic Party – with the Republicans, for instance.
He says:
Social thinking and social progress have reached such a stage of public development in this country that no candidate on any ticket can afford to ignore the legitimate and just demands of the working people. The political power of “labor” has become a well-established fact.
That new ascendancy has been due in great measure to one man – Franklin D. Roosevelt. We do not believe the truth should be veiled in that regard, nor on the other hand do we think that we should preempt the divine prerogative of endeavoring to make his return for that service an eternal reward.
Quentin Reynolds scores again
By John D. Paulus
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Readers can feel terror of death
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