THE WEEK IN REVIEW
THE WEEK IN REVIEW PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT last week gave the world a rough sketch of his Administration's plan to maintain "peace and security" when World War II comes to an end. The President's plan...
...On the domestic front, Senate committees took great quantities of testimony on the need for enacting legislation now to prepare the country for military demobilization and industrial reconversion to peacetime production...
...The Democratic Party last week lost its majority in the House of Representatives for the first time in 13 years...
...Arthur Vandenberg, Michigan Republican, chairman of the Republican Post-War Advisory Committee, said: "Taken as a whole, it is a constructive basis for discussion...
...This is a tribute to political leaders who realize that the national interest demands a program now...
...Drubbing...
...This measure would create a national production employment board made up of representatives of industry, labor, and agriculture, to plan and push for full employment and an economy of abundance, and supervise the disposal of Government war plants...
...discriminated" in favor of a contracting firm run by...
...But Sen...
...Harley Kilgore, West Virginia Democrat, but by Sens...
...There would also be an international court of justice to deal primarily with justiciable disputes...
...Opposes 'Coercive Force* The council envisioned by the President, similar to the governing body of the old League of Nations, "would concern itself with peaceful settlement of international disputes and with the prevention of threats to the peace or breaches of the peace," the President pointed out...
...Sen...
...Sheridan Downey, California, and Claude Pepper, Florida, all Democrats...
...In its final form, the approved legislation provided that TVA submit to House and Senate Appropriations Committees every four months detailed statements of its receipts and expenditures...
...All this, of course, will become possible once our present enemies are defeated and effective arrangements are made to prevent them from making war again...
...Wendell L. Willkie is undecided whether he'll attend the Republican National Convention in Chicago next week...
...We are not thinking of a super-state with its own police forces and other paraphernalia of coercive power...
...Retreat...
...Names And Notes In The News Asia...
...The President's declaration concerning some sort of postwar international organization is politically astute in a campaign year by reason of its very in-definiteness...
...The McKellar amendments would have required Senate confirmation of all officials receiving $4,500 or more a year, and would thus place TVA appointments on the McKellar political patronage list, and would have forced TVA to come to Congress periodically for money instead of drawing on its revenues from the sale of power and fertilizer...
...If it does, we are merely setting the stage of another war...
...The President's plan was a curious blending of internationalism and campaign year concessions to nationalism...
...Sharpest attack on the Roosevelt plan from outside the halls of Congress came from Norman Thomas, Socialist candidate for President, who described it as "worse than the League of Nations...
...Robert Wagner, New York...
...Edwin Johnson, Colorado...
...Congressional investigators exposed a major scandal last week when they showed that high-ranking Army officials at Pearl Harbor "constantly...
...Even a good league cannot cure a bad peace...
...He acknowledged, in sarcastic vein, that Harrison E. Spangler, GOP national chairman, "very kindly offered to provide me with a ticket so that I could listen to the proceedings...
...Vice President Henry A. Wallace, now stumping Asia for the Roosevelt Administration, last week advocated that the United States promote the economic and political freedom of India, the Dutch East Indies, and other colonial areas in the Pacific, and should help bring a defeated Japan into the ranks of a "free Asia" after the war...
...Robert M. La Follette, Jr., Wisconsin Progressive...
...It called for an international organization dominated by the Big Four— Russia, Britain, the United States, and China—to enforce the peace, but it specifically disavowed any thought of a "super-state with its own police forces and other paraphernalia of coercive power...
...It does not provide for any central planning agency, but would assign that work to a director and a multiplicity of advisory committees...
...I wish to emphasize the entirely non-partisan nature of these consultations...
...Kenneth McKellar, Tennessee Democrat, took a thoroughgoing drubbing in Congress last week when both houses agreed to kill his twq proposals to hamstring the operation of the Tennessee Valley Authority...
...President Roosevelt's delicately balanced campaign year declaration on postwar international action sought to avoid a major error committed by Woodrow Wilson a generation ago...
...The President was careful to announce that "all plans and suggestions from groups, organizations, and individuals have been carefully discussed and considered...
...Sen...
...Scandal...
...Sen...
...The President's plan provides for the formation of "a fully representative organization" of "all peace-loving nations" which would elect a smaller council on which the four major United Nations would be constantly represented with a "suitable" number of smaller countries...
...Blast...
...Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgen-thau, Jr., disclosed last week that the war to date has cost 200 billion dollars...
...Reaction Is Mixed The President's plan drew a mixed response from Congress and the nation...
...Progressive forces have rallied around the Kilgore Bill, which is now being sponsored not only by its original author, Sen...
...Home Front Action Urged Foreign policy was not the only field in which the nation groped last week for a pattern of postwar planning...
...H. Styles Bridges, New Hampshire Republican who has long been regarded as one of the Senate's outstanding internationalists, took sharp issue on that score, contending for an organization which would prevent domination by the Big Four...
...Last week while organized labor, liberal farm groups, and progressives in and out of Congress pressed for action on the Kilgore Bill, two spokesmen for the Administration—Assistant President James F. Byrnes and Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson—expressed coolness toward that legislation and indicated strong preference for the more conservative George-Murray Bill...
...Beyond that, the hope of a peaceful and advancing world will rest upon the willingness and ability of the peace-loving nations, large and small, bearing responsibility commensurate with their individual capacities, to work together for the maintenance of peace and security...
...It will have cost another 95 billions before the year is over, he said...
...The purpose of the organization," the President said, "would be to maintain peace and security and to assist the creation, thro»i»tt international cooperation, of conditions of stability and well-being necessary for peaceful and friendly relations among nations...
...Conflict In Congress Meanwhile, Congress remained divided over the merits of two pending bills on industrial reconversion and postwar employment...
...Progressives have warned for many months that the challenge could not much longer be postponed...
...Tom Girdler, chairman of Republic Steel and Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation, asserted that "with the war rushing on to its inevitable conclusion," industry must at once think of reconversion to peacetime pursuits...
...Tom Connally, Texas, and Walter George, Georgia, and similarly inclined Republicans like Sens...
...Robert M. La Follette, Jr., Wisconsin Progressive, pointed to a glaring omission in the President's statement—the failure "to mention the most important question: namely, whether this organization should be established and the United States committed to it prior to the time or after the time when the broad, general terms of the peace are known to Congress and the country...
...but the House refused to go along, and last week the Senate yielded...
...Willkie seemed annoyed at not having been invited to address the convention...
...We are seeking effective agreement and arrangements through which the nations would maintain, according to their capacities, adequate forces to meet the needs of preventing war and of making impossible deliberate preparation for war, and to have such forces available for joint action when necessary...
...The new line-up looks like this: 216 Democrats, 212 Republicans, and four minor party members...
...I want to know," he asserted, "whether the council of nations will be dominated by two or three powers and whether the plan actually means dividing the world into spheres of influence...
...Japan, Wallace argued in a pamphlet just released by the American Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations, should be occupied for a time, but not indefinitely, and should become eventually an "Asiatic Sweden" specializing in non-warlike pursuits of high technological skill...
...All aspects of the postwar program have been debated in a cooperative spirit...
...Last week they had important conservative company...
...As an outstanding example of the Army engineer's "disgraceful" conduct, the investigators revealed that he permitted the German contractors to delay completion of a permanent aircraft warning system that would have detected the approach of Japanese planes...
...George appeared to summarize the position of this group when he said: "It is logical for the four major powers who are doing the major part of the fighting to form the nucleus of a peace organization with smaller nations interested in peace being invited to join...
...We want to have a just peace, not one based on revenge, and if we do not, we are doomed to bitter disillusionment...
...In my view the nature of the peace itself is an indispensable part of an ultimate judgment...
...The other bill, known as the George-Murray measure, is far narrower in scope...
...Bernard M. Baruch and John M. Hancock, New York financiers who are advisers to the Office of War Mobilization and authors of the bitterly controversial reconversion plan which bears their name, urged "hurry, hurry, hurry not only in winning the war, but in being ready for the peace...
...Wallace asserted that while it was not the mission of the United States "to write declarations of independence for the colonies of other countries," it is not "our mission to underwrite other people's declarations of continued empire...
...Wallace White, Maine, and Warren Austin, Vermont...
...But it's neither hopeful nor statesmanlike...
...The march from Naples to Rome cost six billions, 700 millions...
...The Senata had adopted the McKellar proposals after a bitter fight...
...Applause came from conservative, internationalist-minded Democrats like Sens...
...The position of the smaller nations will be very ambiguous, a fact emphasized by Mr...
...The executive board of the CIO adopted a resolution last week blasting the War Labor Board for creating labor unrest and resentment across the nation...
...The bill also calls for expanded social security to aid unemployed workers after the war...
...Invitation...
...German nationals...
...Joseph Ball, Minnesota Republican, who has indicated that he would favor just the sort of superstate rejected by the President, denounced Mr...
...Cost...
...Elbert Thomas, Utah...
...There are three vacancies...
...Worse Than The League' Sen...
...Roosevelt for "using some of the language the' so-called isolationists have employed to oppose any effective world cooperation...
...The firm stalled constantly in completing installations before Pearl Harbor...
...His new organization will be worse than the League of Nations—more completely dominated by three major powers, with China as a weaker fourth...
...Roosevelt's strained relations with de Gaulle at this moment...
Vol. 8 • June 1944 • No. 26
