AMERICA ADRIFT WITHOUT A COMPASS

...Things got out of hand .generally...

...So Byrnes, if he possibly can, will resume his trading with the Russians, a peace worse by far than Versailles will be made, and a Big Three organization far less desirable on paper than the League of Nations will be set up...

...The touchy job of conducting negotiations with the Soviets has been turned over to Secretary of State Byrnes...

...But Snyder relaxed price controls and indicated that he was counting upon quick reconversion to bring supply into balance with demands so that competition could keep prices in check...

...With .Social Democratic strength rising throughout Europe and with the Red Army apparently quite out of hand in occupied countries, the Soviet position becomes less tenable...

...In such a contingency, so far as anyone can see, this country has no plan...

...All his principal subordinates have greater latitude and responsibility than Roosevelt entrusted to any of his...

...Like everything else the atom is adrift...

...So far the Administration has made no use, so far as the record shows, of the dramatic possibilities of the atomic bomb as the lever to raise up a real world government—the course most obviously indicated by developments...

...it is pleasanter not to think what this may mean...

...Rather the Administration has taken the easy way of permitting Congress to satisfy unreasoned public demand for across-the-board tax reduction...

...Many Government economists were of the opinion that industry, with certain exceptions, could afford to raise pay rates 30 per cent without increasing prices— that the proper Government policy would have been to hold the price ljne while organized labor forced the wage increases...

...And this much can be said in its defense: the opposition has offered nothing better—indeed it has offered nothing at all...

...Meanwhile, no effort has been made to re-write the tax laws to encourage employment and buck inflation...

...Like Russian policy, it may come out all right, but it forces American luck beyond the point where the averages hold good...

...He has been given a free hand...

...But it should be borne in mind that Byrnes tried to continue the Teheran-Yalta-San Francisco-Potsdam method of horse trading with the Russians and was saved from doing so only by Molotov's obduracy, not by his own choice...

...SO BYRNES came home looking like a democratic statesman who had finally made a stand on principle against expanding totalitarianism of the stooge police state variety...

...If this too proves impossible, then Britain and the United States would be forced to build an anti-Russian bloc from scratch...

...As things developed, however, strikes slowed up reconversion and delayed production of the necessary goods...

...Byrnes started out at Potsdam trying to impose modest restraints on Russian enslavement of its western neighbors, but at the same time conceding enough to permit the new Russian imperialism to operate...

...at worst, it will lead quickly to another war...

...The current strike wave grows out of labor's demand for an over-all 30 per cent wage rate increase to offset its loss of take-home pay in reverting to the normal peacetime work week from the extended wartime work week...

...At best, Truman's foreign policy, inherited from the Roosevelt Administration, will set up a stabilizing but scarcely democratic Big Three dictatorship of the world...

...SO now the Administration's policy is to ward off strikes where possible, fight a delaying action against price rises, and depend on hick to keep the national economy in some kind of balance...

...Here the responsibility rests with Secretary of Labor Lewis Schwellenbach and Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion Director John Snyder...

...Turning to the domestic Scene and the strike story, the theme is about the same but with different characters...

...Much to his surprise, apparently he found that this position commanded respect both from Congress and the American public...

...It is believed here that Molotov's belligerency stemmed from weakness rather than strength—that the.Russian situation is bad and deteriorating and that the Soviets eventually will have to come to-terms with the United States to get the $6,000,000,000 worth of American goods they need to rehabilitate war-devastated Eastern Russia and to raise the deplorable standard of living of their own people and even of satellite peoples while the process of rebuilding is going on...

...Occasionally he makes startling off-hand statements at his press conferences, creating the impression of decisiveness, but these statements seldom settle anything...

...But that is about all that can be said in mitigation of a policy or lack of policy that gradually dissipates American leadership abroad and risks disaster at home...

...It is too soon to chart the direction of the drift, much less to foretell whether it will lead to the rocks or to a happy port...

...Drift is obvious, but just how much calculation there is in it remains debatable...

...All its eggs are in the Big Three basket...

...This, in itself, is significantly illustrative of Truman's method...

...Perhaps Russia will make shift with what it has looted from Western Europe, with the slave laborers it has taken out of Poland and Germany and with its habit of poverty in order to get along without American help and semi-isolation...

...After killing off the old War Labor Board, the Administration had no way of handling strikes except by turning employer-employe relations back to free collective bargaining...

...The American Army in Europe is being brought home and demobilized faster than the High Command promised—faster than anyone thought possible...

...PERHAPS it will'take such matters as a dispute over the Dardanelles into its own hands and send troops now concentrated in Bulgaria across the border into European Turkey to fortify the western bank of the straits in defiance of the United States and Britain...

...But finally, at London, Byrnes came to the point where none of the concessions he could afford to make were acceptable to Comrade Molotov...

...As a result, the London Conference broke up in failure—with nothing accomplished except a clear demonstration before the world that the Soviets were determined to run Eastern Europe in their own way and to extend their influence also into the Mediterranean and the Pacific...

...Truman's domestic policy can produce semi-controlled inflation and vigorous economic activity approaching a condition of prolonged boom, or it can blow up a bubble of postwar prosperity that will soon burst with as loud a report as the 1929 blow, leaving behind the same unemployment'misery...

...These assumptions may or may not be well founded...

...Similarly, he has given Congress many suggestions, but few of them will be acted upon at this session because there is no effective follow-up from the White House...

...THIS much can be said for Administration policy: it doesn't pile up irrevocable mistakes...

...President Truman's way is to postpone decisions, not to cross bridges until he gets his feet wet, and to depend heavily upon time and circumstance to solve his problems for him...

...Byrnes was a hero in spite of himself...

...The Administration's way of doing things can be assessed by examining its handling of two specific problems—one foreign, the other domestic—relations with Russia and industrial strikes...

...America Adrift Without A Compass By KENNETH CRAWFORD Washington, D. C. AFTER six months of the Truman administration, it is apparent that its policy, both at home and abroad, insofar as it has a definable policy, is one of calculated drift...