WILLKIE'S 'INTERNATIONALISM'

...Louis speech, as carried in part in the Portland Oregonian', on the new Republican notions of "internationalism...

...As our train swung down the Columbia, we looked from the windows at the Indians netting salmon at Celilo—a hazardous business indeed where a misstep means death amidst the churning logs in the waters directly underfoot...

...What we started to write about was Wendell Willkie's St...

...But men of good will from the piney slopes above Portland to the sidewalks of New York want no such world as Willkie and his kind are proposing...

...Willkie is characteristically vague...

...When the Kaiser tanker, The Oregon Trail, goes out to sea with its sister ships on both oceans, she has for invisible cargo the great longing of a strong, young nation for speedy victory and lasting peace...

...We looked out at The Dalles where the pioneers made boats of driftwood for the voyage downstream, and soon there was the Bonneville Dam, whose magnificent fall was hidden from our sight by a wartime barricade...

...Today, at Henry Kaiser's Swan Island yards, they are launching a huge oil tanker called The Oregon Trail, and the Oregon Centennial Committee is parading with a motley display of pioneer vehicles in which ride the costumed descendants of the first far-ranging One Thousand who came over the incredibly rugged Oregon Trail to set up in the Northwest an empire whose potentialities 100 years later are still virtually unrealized...

...The Wilderness In Front The pioneers of a century ago and their spiritual descendants, the big dam builders, the shipyard workers, and the lumber crews didn't and don't go in for fancy ambiguities like "internationalism" and "the enterprise system," but they know darned well that Mr...

...Piling cliche upon platitude, he sounds off to the effect: "I do believe deeply in international cooperation, not because I love America less but because I love her more—the America of well being, of jobs, of opportunity, of ideals, and of free men...

...They know, these latter-day political and economic and industrial pioneers, that such peace as may come on the Willkie terms will be no more than a breathing space between wars...

...And we who had come from the pavements of New York felt old and faded and small in the face of the youth and drive of this great new country...

...A rancher from Idaho wanted to sell us a saddle, mistaking us, who learned to "post" on a Central Park bridlepath 40 years ago, for one of his kind...

...But I take it that isn't exactly what Wendell has in mind with his One World palaver...

...Just as when the veterans unyoked their wagons at Walla Walla and realized that though a continent of hardships and perils was behind them, they still had to clear the wilderness in front, so we know today that until we clear away the wilderness of greed camouflaged as "enterprise," of cartelization disguised as "internationalism," there will be no peace of any sort for ourselves or our children...

...Willkie's world of the monopolization of natural resources, and the ruthless exploitation by small groups of profit-greedy men of consumers and workers alike, are dead as Daniel Boone's coon...

...BUSINESS brings me to Oregon, 100 years after the first bearded pioneers climbed stiffly from their wagons at old Fort Walla Walla to look over the turbulent expanse of the Columbia River...

...Now from Bonneville to the Norris Dam a war is being won, and men, women, and children, a great cross section of them lineal descendants of the pioneers, know a richer life at home because of a cooperative "enterprise system," if you like...

...The way I figure it is that Wendell, turning Marx upside down, even as Marx turned Hegel, wants to internationalize what he so closely calls "the enterprise system...

...True, he and his pals could not get up enterprise enough to supply the folks of the Tennessee Valley with power and light to keep them going, but he sweated blood to see that the government shouldn't make available to its citizens the prime necessities of civilized living...

...Just what does he mean by "internationalism...

...In our day, internationalism meant Karl Marx and the First and Second Internationale, and we sang "For the international party shall be the human race," long, long before the first bands of the Red Army blared the song around the Kremlin...

...As head of the Commonwealth and Southern, the J. P. Morgan holding company, Willkie was the plumed knight for all the utility Black Cavalry which fought the erection of big dams everywhere...

...There was a time—and not 100 years ago either— when out here in the Northwest, enterprise had reality in American life and there are plenty of traces of it left in such stupendous collective, cooperative enterprises as the great dams along the Columbia, which Willkie and the Kilowatt Klan fought so viciously...

...In view of the fact that this precious system, with its recurrent breakdowns, was one of the chief factors in getting us all into our present mess, the rest of the world is entitled to flee the sort of "cooperation" which Wendell prescribes, as a plague...

...But this isn't to be a travelogue on the Northwest...

...There Was A Time Now having just described this America as a land where "the enterprise system" is being done to death by a power-hungry dictatorship in Washington, it follows that when the Republicans rescue the embattled system on the home front, we ride out on a post-war crusade to extend that system to the "lesser breeds without the law...

...Willkie Reverses Karl Marx The stockman from Pendleton told us stories, some presumably aprocryphal, of Indian fighting on the old Trail which he had in turn heard from his grandfather...

...A lumberman from Spokane talked with pardonable pride of the breathtaking war production job that has been done in the woods...

...Wendell can empty words of their meanings faster than a drunk can empty a bottle of Scotch, and just as he fiddles around with "internationalism" until it means nothing, so he and his fellows have emptied the one time word "enterprise...

...About this thing Mr...