Behind the Bricker Amendment
HESS, STEPHEN H.
Behind the Bricker Amendment How friends of the amendment placed unprecedented pressure on Senator Wiley to desert the President's side By Stephen H. Hess The proposed Bricker Amendment to the...
...Wisconsin citizens are noted for fairness...
...But 1950 was also the last year in which the CCG registered under the Federal Regulation of Lobbying Act...
...The telegrams were signed in the name of the CCG, although Rumely has denied their authorship or authorization...
...Ed.] The amendment has received strong support from such organizations as the Daughters of the American Revolution, the American Legion, and the American Bar Association's Committee on Peace and Law Through the United Nations...
...Then the CCG sent telegrams to everyone considered a "key leader...
...This was only the beginning of the torrent of literature that descended on Wisconsin: A booklet by Bryson Reinhardt called "You...
...By 1950, Executive Secretary Edward Rumely claimed that the CCG had managed to send almost 10 million pieces of postage-free mail under the franks of sympathetic Congressmen—thereby saving themselves (and costing the taxpayer) over $250,000...
...threatened that, without the Bricker Amendment, American citizens might find themselves in prisons...
...The CCG anti-Wiley campaign opened with a dinner-meeting for 400...
...The primary disseminator of this propaganda was the Committee for Constitutional Government, a group originally formed in 1937 to fight Franklin Roosevelt's court-packing plan...
...It also said that foreign governments might "control" our schools, churches, unions, grocery stores, etc...
...As his plane flew him to another engagement, the convention got to work...
...The full story behind Wiley's new belligerence has never been revealed...
...Yet, within six months, the 70-year-old Wiley was branding the amendment "the most radical attack ever seriously made against the United States Constitution...
...The CCG makes no campaign contributions, endorses no candidates...
...Manion's speech was widely reprinted...
...Coincidentally, at that election, there happened to be a man named Roosevelt who was seeking a third term...
...Wiley's fifteen-minute speech did not mention the Bricker Amendment...
...Despite Administration efforts to dilute Bricker's proposal, the Ohio Senator is holding firm and claims early victory for his plan...
...Wint Smith (R., Kan...
...He does not intend re-election and alined [sic] himself with enemies of America...
...At the same time, the present administration has energetically opposed Bricker's proposal...
...The nature and methods of the forces behind the Bricker Amendment make it clear why Senator Wiley, and other GOP moderates, are so determined to conserve the Constitution...
...The CCG has been equally active on legislative matters...
...That same year, it spent almost $10,000 (according to Rumely) to "stir up support for killing the rent-control bill...
...It reported distribution of "scores of thousands" of copies of a folder entitled "To All Citizens, Everywhere," which warned of the "highly organized internationalist forces, planning a world superstate...
...Gannett said in 1944: "We are not a 'political' committee within the meaning of the law...
...Politely, the 4,000 delegates from 71 counties heard their senior Senator speak on "The Challenges to the Republican Party...
...It is hardly surprising, after this deliberate attempt to create an atmosphere of hysteria, that the "impeach Wiley" telegrams were sent...
...But Treasurer Sumner Gerard said a year later that "If we didn't have any political effect on election of candidates or on legislation, we might as well fold up...
...In a Foreign Prison...
...He opposes Bricker Amendment, seeing harm in Amendment but no harm in Constitution being set aside...
...For example, during the 1940 Presidential campaign, CCG Chairman Samuel Pettengill told a Senate investigating committee that his organization could not be regulated under the Hatch Act, because the $150,000 it was raising was to be used only in an "educational campaign" against the third-term idea...
...There is no breakdown on how much of this went into Wisconsin, although the CCG has frankly stated that it considers Wiley "the most serious handicap to early passage...
...On the Bricker Amendment, the Committee for Constitutional Government reports that it has already "reached about 200,000 civic leaders by direct mail...
...By 1944, publisher Frank Gannett, one of the Committee's founders, boasted that it had mailed 80 million pieces of literature from its New York mailing room, a room larger than a football field...
...The issue had been joined, then, when the Wisconsin Republican Convention assembled on June 13...
...In 1944, Pettengill's book, For Americans Only, came out just in time for the Presidential election...
...On June 23, however, Wiley announced that Rumely's denial "is not satisfactory...
...In 1948, the CCG widely distributed a pamphlet stating: "The Wagner Act assume[s] that member[s] of labor unions are a privileged class who are entitled to plunder the underprivileged non-unionists...
...But it has the knack of making its sympathies clear...
...In 1949, it distributed 450,000 pamphlets against "socialized medicine" under the frank of Rep...
...But the sources and methods of this extraordinary pressure campaign on Wiley deserve study, as at least a partial explanation of how "popular demand" for the Bricker Amendment was created...
...In North Carolina, it managed to place 60,000 copies of a digest of John T. Flynn's The Road Ahead in rural mail boxes...
...A Freeman reprint attacked former Justice Owen J. Roberts and the "fanatic mentality that holds national sovereignty to be an evil...
...The telegrams said: "Prepare resolution to impeach Wiley now for violating oath to defend and protect Constitution...
...A reprint from Human Events, conservative newsletter, accused the "opposition to the Bricker Amendment" of "a bit of treason...
...To achieve recovery, the evil thing must be rooted out...
...And Secretary of State Dulles, who two years ago favored Bricker's plan, has now declared that it "would set the clock back to an approximation of the conditions which existed under the Articles of Confederation...
...To Wiley's eternal credit, the pressure only made his convictions twice as forceful...
...These telegrams, coming on the morning of the Republican State Convention, were provoked by U.S...
...The Senator is not unaware of this swelling criticism from home...
...Behind this dramatic censure of Wiley were weeks and weeks in which Wisconsin was saturated with Bricker Amendment propaganda...
...The next day, in Washington, Wiley heard for the first time the terse resolution that had been jammed through after he had left the hall: "Resolved, that the Republican party of Wisconsin does hereby censure its senior Senator for his failure to actively support the Bricker Amendment and his vote in committee against the amendment, and that the Republican party of Wisconsin insist that the senior Senator reconsider his stand...
...Was this stiletto attack fair...
...The trick is, as the man used to say, "no names, please...
...the main address was delivered by Clarence Manion, former Dean of Notre Dame Law School and currently Chairman of the President's Commission on Intergovernmental Relations...
...If he adheres to his present policy and opposes the Bricker Amendment (about which he so far remains 'on the fence'), then he may fail of renomination...
...On page 5, we present a legal analysis of the proposed amendment, written for us by Professor Morris D. Forkosch of Brooklyn Law School...
...The President said he is "unalterably opposed to any amendment which would change our traditional treaty-making power or which would hamper the President in his Constitutional authority to conduct foreign affairs...
...AT 3:39 in the morning of June 13, 1953, an unidentified man walked into the Western Union office in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and sent identical telegrams to forty Wisconsin Republican County Chairmen...
...By this time, the Committee was the second largest lobby in the United States, second only to the American Medical Association...
...Manion's erudition and respectability have made him an ideal front for Merwin K. Hart's National Economic Council, as well as the CCG...
...The amendment is designed to prevent treaties from becoming internal law without legislation "which would be valid in the absence of a treaty," and to give Congress the power to regulate all executive agreements...
...But it was introduced from the floor and pushed through by a voice vote late in the day with few delegates still in the hall...
...Why the change from polite remonstrance to violent opposition...
...The most potent piece of propaganda was aimed at Wiley: "The Senator . . . is "on the spot...
...To this, the Chicago Tribune made a characteristic comment: "Senator Wiley said that the action of the Wisconsin convention 'was not just quite cricket.' He may have got this Anglicism from his British bride, as the game isn't played on the Fair Grounds in Madison...
...This article by Stephen H. Hess, of the Political Science Department at Johns Hopkins University, helps explain how the Bricker forces became so powerful...
...Behind the Bricker Amendment How friends of the amendment placed unprecedented pressure on Senator Wiley to desert the President's side By Stephen H. Hess The proposed Bricker Amendment to the Constitution is now the major issue before Congress...
...But the key to his transformation lies in the unprecedented pressure to which he was subjected in an effort to win him to Bricker's side...
...Among its crusades: In 1945, it pressured state legislatures to go on record for a Constitutional amendment to limit Federal peacetime taxes on income, gifts and inheritances to 25 per cent...
...The convention refused to consider a roll-call vote and then adjourned...
...Prior to the convention's opening, its Resolutions Committee had refused to entertain this motion...
...the book aimed to draw a parallel between the New Deal and Nazi Germany...
...Senator Alexander Wiley's firm but diplomatic stand against the proposed Bricker Amendment...
...How can the Committee have a "political effect" and not be "political...
...Two months before, Wiley, who is the Republican Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had declared that the amendment would "inadvertently hamstring the President and the Secretary of State in the conduct of foreign policy...
...A full discussion by Morris D. Forkosch of the substantive merits of the amendment follows this article...
...Wisconsin Republicanism would be refreshed if the party would turn to another Senator of different outlook when the occasion offers...
...As for the Wisconsin-convention resolution, Wiley replied: "If those who engineered this deal wanted to condemn my position, they should have told me so and given me a chance to reply...
...This comparatively mild statement served to inform the public that, as ranking Republican member of the Judiciary Committee, to which Bricker's proposal had been referred, Wiley would vote against it...
...He went on to say that if the CCG "wants to carry on this campaign," it should set up a "Subcommittee for Unconstitutional Misgovernment...
...Among other elections in which the CCG played an active role were the 1950 defeats of Senators Frank Graham (D., N. C.) and Claude Pepper (D., Fla...
...Executive Secretary Rumely (who was convicted after World War I of violating the Trading with the Enemy Act) says the CCG is "educational, non-profitmaking and nonpartisan...
...How do CCG leaders describe their organization...
Vol. 37 • February 1954 • No. 5
