WAR BY ONE MAN'S WILL
Villard, Oswald Garrison
War By One Man's Will The Danaers Of Dumbarton Oaks By Oswald Garrison Villard i HISTORY is repeating itself in the most extraordinary way in this second World War. One of the most striking...
...One of the most striking evidences of this is that we are now developing another fight in this country over the proposed United Nations Council which bids fair to rival in intensity and bitterness the fight against the Treaty of Versailles...
...The Dumbarton Oaks proposals are going to split the nation, first, because of the doubt whether any such league dominated by three great Powers can possibly bring peace to the world, and secondly, whether the United States should, and constitutionally can, delegate the war-making power to one man who will sit on the Council of the United Nations as the American representative...
...It probably represented a culmination of a thousand years of struggle of democratic peoples to get that power out of the hands of the executives who had been putting the peoples of the world into war for two thousand years...
...To my mind one of the evil effects of this concentration of the debate on the question of a delegate's power is that it throws into the background every other means of removing the causes of war and assumes that we are going to continue, we Big Three at least, great militaristic nations...
...If our Congress is not needed to make the greatest of all decisions, then it is certainly not needed to make any other...
...If Congress wanted to stop him and his delegate from going to war, it would have to pass a law repealing the power of the delegate...
...Clark: "The decision of whether or not to go to war is the most serious that a nation can make...
...I know that many people will say that it would have been better if we had gone in at once...
...The effect of this would be to make it impossible for Congress to prevent war, save by two-thirds vote, while this all-powerful delegate or delegates could do it alone...
...Constitutional Doubts Five distinguished lawyers, headed by John W. Davis, once candidate for the Presidency and a man of high personal and legal standing, have certified that in their judgment this power can be given to a representative of the Government without doing violence to the Constitution...
...Obscuring The Causes Of War In the Town Hall debate, Mr...
...Flynn made the excel-*-lent point that other nations would not think of handing over any such vast power to any delegate...
...Unfortunately we are blinding ourselves again to the absolute vital truth that as long as great military establishments are maintained there will be war...
...It ought not to be made by any single man...
...Clark says, if we begin any such attack we have got to win the war...
...If he tried it, the House could by a simple vote of no confidence throw him out of office overnight...
...No Prime Minister would dare propose to Parliament that he could plunge England into war against the wishes of the House...
...Most Vital Decisions Of All Curiously enough, the two Senators favoring this have shifted their ground and hedged to the extent that they said that the delegate should not have the right to order us into a full-fledged big war, but only into a small war, or an aggression in the beginning of its development...
...That power is in the hands of the Congress and there is nothing in the Constitution which provides or indicates that the Congress has a right to abdicate that power or delegate it to anybody...
...Joseph Ball of Minnesota, who debated the subject recently at a Town Hall meeting, with Sen...
...But it is stretching things pretty far to say that the latter clause would permit the war-making power to be handed over to some Presidential appointee on the theory that some phase of international law would be violated by an aggressor nation...
...Again, as has been pointed out by Henry Stuart Clark in the New York Times, the proposal that our representative shall only use our forces for policing does not hold because the attacked nation will not differentiate...
...As Mr...
...The idea that an American representative should have the power to decide, in case of a conflict between Turkey and Greece, that Turkey was the aggressor and order America's share of the international armed force into war seems preposterous...
...He stated the truth that no British Prime Minister would be allowed to put his country into war since he holds office only by consent of Parliament and must resign on any adverse vote...
...Shall we put into the hands of one man the power of life and death over American youth and can we do so without violating the Constitution and making it just a scrap of paper...
...Had there been an American delegate on a Council then we should have been drawn in from the start...
...When their cities are destroyed by our bombers they will not say, "Oh, this is only police work and not a real war...
...Why not talk about disarmament the world over...
...If Congress gives him by law the power to declare war, it cannot recapture that power...
...No Prime Minister would think of moving toward war without first having ascertained from the, House of Commons that it would support him...
...Claude Pepper of Florida and Sen...
...Even if this were true, it would still not answer the question whether any single man shall have the power to decide the question of life and death and suffering for countless Americans...
...I contend that that proposal in a democratic constitutional government is an incredible one, and no English government would tolerate it for a moment...
...In England, the legal warmaking authority is Parliament," Mr...
...This writer has long taken the position that no Executive should have the right to put this country into war, and that that power should rest only in the hands of the people...
...The President could veto that and it would take a two-thirds vote of Congress to override the veto and recover the power over war...
...If we are going to do this ought we not to seek an amendment to our historic, fundamental law covering this case...
...The Prime Minister is a mere agent of the House of Commons...
...Chapman Revercomb of West Virginia and John T. Flynn, the author...
...This is also the opinion of Sen...
...It ought to be made by its whole- democratically selected representative assembly —in our case, Congress...
...With us, however, the President is independent...
...The difficulty is that big wars start from small ones, as the last two World Wars prove...
...It was Hitler's attack upon Poland that produced the present war...
...The suggestion, made during the Town Hall debate, that of course the delegate would not act until he had talked with the President of the United States on the telephone is not the answer, because that merely shifts the individual responsibility to the President, and after the experience in this war of President Roosevelt's beginning hostilities against the Germans long prior to Pearl Harbor without authority of Congress, thereis every reason that we should tie the hands of the Executive rather than to give him more power...
...Flynn also made an excellent point when he said: "The men who wrote the Constitution knew that war was the gravest step a nation can take, and they put the power to declare war in the Congress and the Congress alone...
...Flynn pointed out...
...Mr...
...I want especially to quote this statement by Mr...
...The two first named fell back upon a clause in our Constitution which says that the Executive shall have the power to put down piracy on the high seas and to deal with violations of international law...
Vol. 8 • December 1944 • No. 50
