A Senatorial Holiday
A SENATORIAL HOLIDAY I T HAS become clear that a senator is, after all, no ¦*¦ whit different from the ordinary citizen. Coralled with his fellows into a special session for the purpose of...
...What he is opposing is the assumption underlying any discussion of armament which begins with conceding that the admirals of His Majesty are entitled to as many ships as the admirals of the Navy Board...
...At any rate the spinning out would take time and so load the Senate with future business...
...Had a settlement been made at Geneva in 1927 upon the only proposal possible at that time, the fleets of the three powers would have been approximately 680,000 tons greater than under the Treaty now in consideration...
...This is really not so easy to do under the circumstances...
...It is this fact which most conveniently accounts for otherwise unfathomable political backfiring...
...Nevertheless this debate is not entirely a matter of le roi s'amuse...
...Nor does Senator Johnson believe in the possibility of such a conflict...
...Here he has far more support throughout the country than is generally realized...
...Political events and ideas exist in any number of different spaces and times...
...Coralled with his fellows into a special session for the purpose of considering the London Treaty, he finds (a) that he really doesn't know more about it than anybody else and (b) that the appropriateness of any stand he takes will be diversely estimated by the folks back home...
...It supplied the figures—which have been too frequently adduced to justify repetition here— and examined the major criticisms thus far advanced against the Treaty, more especially the argument that the United States should have three more io,ooo-ton cruisers with eight-inch guns...
...The heart of the opposition is Hiram Johnson...
...It is inconceivable, of course, that an England not turned utterly insane would seek war with us because of a treaty which pares a thirty-four point margin of actual superiority down to a two point margin of theoretical superiority...
...Owing to the vastness of the country, regional differences and vast disparities between the journals which supply news and comment, public opinion in the United States exhibits a truly remarkable, almost unfathomable congeries of planes of information...
...But there has been other oratory in plenty, some of it frankly anti-Hoover and some of it unrelievedly jingoistic...
...The discussion of the Senate's right to see all the documents bearing upon the negotiations— which is as far as the summer-school has got at the present writing—may be very important as a practical factor but is intrinsically sheer piffle...
...But if governments had not witnessed the same paralyzing divorce time and time again, the records of our race would be almost too good to be true...
...It means incidentally that government has need of something more than a sound case and doctrine—personality and diplomatic skill, to which all groups of citizenry are far more amenable than they are to reasoning or statistics...
...And the tonic which keeps that sturdy organ pumping merrily away is something he diagnoses as fear of Great Britain but which is in reality the same "anti-entaglement" policy which, after 1919, won him repute and applause...
...The negotiators at London had to deal with a highly complex situation, in which European entanglements loomed large and conflicting notions of naval efficiency divided even the officers of the great powers...
...Opposition to the Treaty might profit by digging out some remarks which, when spun into certain forms of publicity, would stiffen the backs of patriotic last-ditchers...
...Primarily he must manage to be a patriot, and since love of country hardly seems compatible with curtailing its military power he must be able to show his constituency that something has been gained for every cannon lost...
...Which comes near to being the most concrete plum harvested in the London orchard...
...Hoover, the lecturing has been done in rotation...
...and while he probably will not succeed in the present instance, it is apparent that the effort to secure American diplomatic and military parity needs more aggressive leadership than it now gets...
...Since anything more than a compromise was out of the question, the value of the Treaty rests upon the sum-total of a series of minor changes...
...Some of it has been wordier and more pointless than the poorest discourse which distinguishes various universities basking under the caloric sun...
...While students of political economy and other people close to events are abreast of ideas and affairs, whole sections of the nation really live in 1920 while still others are as far back as Roosevelt's time or the Spanish-American War...
...He likewise realizes that to air private diplomatic messages in public is not only against solidly established precedent but also a potential source of grave embarrassment to the administration in dealing with foreign countries...
...One naturally finds the present divorce between case and personality a bit trying...
...It ought to be fairly simple to expatiate upon those 680,000 hypothetical tons until every one of them has been festooned with a metaphor and preserved in rhetorical alcohol...
...Hoover then went on to say: "To those who seek earnestly and properly for reduction in warships I would point out that, as compared with January 1 of this year, the total aggregate navies of the three powers under this treaty will have been reduced by nearly 300,000 tons...
...Trying to get at the bottom of these in a manner worthy of men committed to the harvest of votes, the Senate has become a veritable summer-school in which, after an initial address by Mr...
...The President's talk was neat, brisk and informative...
...Every senator knows that he can walk around the block and take a look at every telegram and report...
Vol. 12 • July 1930 • No. 12
