Le Pouvoir est la manifestation supreme de la peur que l'homme fait à luimême par ses efforts pour s'en libirer. Là est peut-être le secret le plus profond et obscur de l'histoire. Ferrero, Pouvoir, p. 43.

The current discussion of a future world order has made it plain that the problem of coming international relations is of a magnitude surpassing even that of winning the war. It is not intended here to add to the rising tide of concrete plans in this field, but rather to elucidate certain proposals in the light of some basic features of the present system of international relations and, starting from a clearer picture of what is, to seek to discriminate between what is desirable and undesirable, possible and utopian. Wrong concepts of the forces underlying the present system have too often produced “peace plans” built on the sands of wishful thinking, and therefore bound to be wrecked on the rocks of reality. Disappointment caused by the failure of ill-conceived devices, in turn, is apt to produce a “realism” which ridicules any attempt to discuss international relations in terms of a possible evolution toward a more integrated stage.

Power, in modern international relations, has been the ultimate means of deciding issues and adjusting relationships among the units constituting international society. The states have regarded themselves as “sovereign” entities, not subordinated to any superior political power nor guided in their power politics by considerations of an a-political, i.e., power-alien, nature.

More than once in its history, the American Political Science Association has met in a period of national emergency. Our Philadelphia gathering of 1917 (the thirteenth in the series) found the country occupied with a major conflict overseas for which it still was arduously preparing more than eight months after the declaration of a state of war by the Congress. Our Detroit meeting of 1932 (the twenty-eighth, and one of the most thinly attended in a decade) took place at a time when two and a quarter years of industrial depression and social disintegration had cast a pall of pessimism and despair over a national scene so recently—and so deceptively—effulgent, and when there was much shaking of heads over the outlook for our entire political and economic system. Twenty-three years ago this week, indeed, the continuity of our annual conventions was broken by the omission altogether of a meeting which was to have been held in Cleveland, a request having been made by our own sixth president—then in the White House—that railroads groaning under the task of transporting fifty thousand tons of supplies every twenty-four hours for the use of two million soldiers in France (even though no longer actually fighting when our meeting-time came round) should not be burdened with carrying people to gatherings that could be dispensed with or postponed.

To a free people, the very word “censorship” always has been distasteful. In its theory, it runs counter to all democratic principles; in practice, it can never be made popular, can never please anyone.

Everything the censor does is contrary to all that we have been taught to believe is right and proper. The Post Office Department, for example, has two proud mottoes: “The mail must go through,” and “The privacy of the mail must be protected at all hazards.” But censorship stops the mail, it invades the privacy of the mail, it disposes of the mail as may seem best. The same thing holds true in the publishing business. Censorship limits the lively competition and free enterprise of reporters. It relegates many a scoop to the waste basket. It wields a blue pencil—both theoretical and actual—on news stories, magazine articles, advertisements, and photographs. Censorship also enters the radio industry, where it may edit scripts and in some cases stop entire programs.

Yet even the most vociferous critics of the principle of censorship agree that in war-time some form and amount of censorship is a necessity. It then becomes not merely a curtailment of individual liberty, but a matter of national security. It is one of the many restrictions that must be imposed on people fighting for the right to throw off those restrictions when peace returns.

Recent years have seen increasing experimentation with and reliance upon interlevel administrative collaboration for adapting our traditional practices of government to the rapid extension and elaboration of national policies. In many instances, collaboration across the levels has been based upon the well-tried device of the grant-in-aid. In others, the practices of conferring, advising, transmitting official information, and acting jointly or interdependently for the performance of governmental services have been quickened. In yet other instances where federal as well as state agencies now regulate the same areas of business enterprise, a considerable body of collaborative interlevel practice has been developed. It is with this last field, especially as the collaborative action is directed toward the regulation of public service enterprises, that we are here concerned.

Prior to 1933, federal regulation of public service enterprises had a long experience with railroads (1887), a longer experience with banks coming under the national system (1863), and a shorter experience under the Federal Reserve System (1913), and a yet shorter experience with water-power enterprises (1920). States and localities developed agencies and practices for the regulation of railroads and local transportation systems, banks, water, gas, telephone, and electric utilities, and, in the twenties, highway bus and trucking operations.

As an aid in interpreting the outcome of the 1942 congressional election and subsequent general elections, this paper presents two basic studies that have been found very helpful in connection with the 1940 election. One of these deals with the changes in political sentiment for the country as a whole, as shown by the long-time record of relative strength of the Democratic party in the two-party vote in congressional and presidential elections. From this long-time record it is possible to derive the characteristics of our political tides and an interpretation of the most recent changes as background for forthcoming elections. For example, the Democratic party attained its greatest strength on record in 1936, but in 1938 the tide turned against it, largely because of the 1937–38 business recession. Recovery by 1940 checked the decline.

The second study (in two sections) deals with the basic similarities between the pattern of political behavior for a given series of elections for the country as a whole and the political behavior of most of the states. From the “normal” relationships that can be developed between the national and state experience, it is possible to determine the influence of certain major issues, such as the isolationist and third-term issues in 1940. In that election, the Eastern and Far Western states voted more Democratic and the Midwestern and Great Plains states voted less Democratic than usual. These discrepancies are immediately traceable more to isolationist and anti-third-term sentiment than to any of the other issues.

Only a decade or two ago, the Monroe Doctrine was in disfavor. The vitriolic pens of its critics denounced it as an “indisputable evidence of our overweening national conceit.” They condemned it as an “obsolete shibboleth,” “hoary with age”—a doctrine which the twentieth century would surely relegate to the dusty archives of diplomatic history. As late as 1937, no less a person than the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations remarked in the course of an interview that the Monroe Doctrine was dead.

Time and circumstance, however, often bring remarkable changes. Since the beginning of World War II, the red blood corpuscles of Pan-American unity have instilled new life and vitality into the Doctrine. Curiously enough, after 120 years, the very threats which confronted President Monroe in 1823 have risen again to becloud the security of the Western Hemisphere. Historians may have argued (before the fall of France) that the Holy Alliance, with its determination “to put an end to the system of representative government,” constituted a greater danger to the New World than the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis. It is clear, however, that the fascist concepts of the master race and of world domination are far more menacing to democracy than the avowed aims of the Holy Alliance ever were. The tremendous striking power which the Axis has so amply demonstrated in a world shrivelled by technology, coupled with the demoralizing effects of up-to-date fifth column techniques, makes the case even clearer.

Since the establishment of the Nationalist régime in Canton in the year 1925 by the Kuomintang, the government of China has undergone only one major structural change. At the beginning, aside from the machinery which assured control of the government by the Kuomintang, the one organ of political power was the State Council, under which functioned the various departments of administration, civil and military, of law-making and of adjudication. The State Council was a going concern, and the various departments were subordinate organs. In October, 1929, there occurred a change. The Five Yuan were set up, each responsible to the Party machinery and each functioning independently. The State Council was retained, but, except for a brief interval, it no longer enjoyed substantial power.

The government of China, as it stood at the beginning of the war, was very much the government as set up in 1929, though necessarily with many important modifications. Supreme power rested with the Central Political Committee, which was a committee of the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang, charged with the direction and supervision of the government. It was not to be confused with the Central Executive Committee itself. While the Central Executive Committee met only at very long intervals, usually once or twice a year, and, being a large body of 300-odd persons, did little more than hear speeches and reports and pass resolutions, the Central Political Committee was a going concern and met every week to decide on important matters of state.

Often it has been asserted that if the United States had stood by her allies after 1918 and joined the League of Nations, peace in Europe would have been secure. While this overstresses the point, it is certainly true that the lack of unity among the victors, both at Versailles and afterwards, deprived the world of anything like a center of coördination and leadership. Even the Concert of Europe of bygone days could claim greater authority than a League from which five out of seven great powers were either permanently or temporarily absent, and in which the two remaining powers, Britain and France, were rarely in agreement.

In view of this experience, it makes sense to regard continued coöperation between at least some of the important allies of this war, assuming the defeat of Hitler and his partners, as being an essential prerequisite for a more durable peace. If at least the two great English-speaking powers could form between themselves a solid partnership, so it is argued, would not their combined strength and their supremacy of the seas quite naturally attract other nations into their orbit and thus enable them to preserve the order and peace of the world? Their rôle is envisaged as a kind of enlarged replica of that which the British Empire fulfilled with no little success throughout most of the nineteenth century.

In any party system, it would seem of some importance to establish rules and qualifications for membership in the different party groups, in order to bring together those persons, and only those persons, who adhere to the respective party principles. That should be particularly important in a two-party system, where the principles and issues are presumably sharply defined and clearly distinguishable. This matter has received increasing attention during recent years, and the importance of the problem was well stated by the Chicago Tribune, in an editorial referring to the Illinois primary campaign of 1938:

“The advantages of party organization and party responsibility have been proved over a long range of political testing, and although the abuses at times seem substantial. If a party is to be recognized as having legal standing, and if it is to make its nominations under the direction of law, there should be, it would seem, some determined qualification of its voters…. There shouldn't be a pretence of one thing and a fact of another. If Democrats and Republicans are to have legal standing as such, then Democrats should not make Republican decisions and Republicans should not make Democratic decisions. To permit this is to commit a fraud against the citizens who are trying to make their organization and their decisions according to the prevailing theory of political action and party responsibility.”

Within the last five years, the Supreme Court of the United States has added decisions of greater importance to the case law of religious freedom than had been accumulated in all the years since the adoption of the Bill of Rights. The importance of two of these recent decisions rests upon the subordination of freedom of action based on sectarian beliefs to the restrictions of society as a whole. In one of the two cases, the law of society was a board of education order that school children participate in the flag salute exercise on pain of expulsion from the public schools; in the other, it was peddlers' license tax ordinances. Because neither of these decisions has been accepted as a firmly rooted precedent, it will be well to examine them in the light of the history of the federally secured right of religious freedom and in the light of the immediate public reactions to them.

A considerable proportion of the early emigration to the thirteen original colonies was undoubtedly due to a desire to escape religious persecution in England and on the Continent. Those colonists, however, were as insistent that their own particular form of religion be adhered to as their oppressors had been. The story of Roger Williams, who was expelled from the colony of Massachusetts because of his non-conformist views and who established the colony of Rhode Island as a sanctuary of religious tolerance, and that of Ann Hutchinson, who also was exiled from the Bay Colony for a like reason, are monuments to the intolerance of the Puritans.

In spite of the recent loosening of the membership or affiliation requirements in Illinois and a few other states, the general tendency throughout the development of party regulation has been toward greater strictness in this respect, toward more effective protection of the party organization against the independent voter with a careless party conscience. This is indicated, in the first place, by the turn toward an official definition and administration of these membership tests. That is, the parties are no longer left free to determine their own membership rules as they please, but these rules are to an increasing extent prescribed by state law and administered by state officials. Secondly, the tests of party membership have become, on the whole, more complex and more comprehensive, and therefore more difficult to evade—the closed primary has become more and more tightly closed. Thirdly, there has been a drift from the challenge to the enrollment or registration system, and, in general, legislation or other official action which requires greater care by the voter and the candidate in the selection of his party, and which imposes greater difficulty in changing his party affiliation.

Theories of the nature of the political community vary with conditions. Just as political pluralism was a phase of the late mellowness of liberalism, so the organic theory of the state is suited for more heroic moments. When integral nationalism was discovered in the United States after the defeat of the South, it was not inappropriate that organic theories should have been supported in order to explain the place of the American nation in history. Nor can it be surprising that today some of the leaders of the United States are looking at the nation as a kind of social organism.

If one reads with attention the words of President Lincoln during the early days of the Civil War, it can be seen that the Union was more than just a voluntary association of political communities. The states had their being within the Union, and the Union itself had given birth to the states. Even the history of Texas and its relation to the Union did not impress Lincoln as simply consensual, for if there was consent it was all on the side of Texas. Whatever liberty and authority the states possessed they derived from the Union, and not from any original powers of their own. When the Union became a symbol of organicity in the mind of the North, the earlier individualistic theory of the state was remote enough. The social contract, the consent of all to government, was suitable in the American Revolution, since protest was being made against the specific, arbitrary actions of the British government, animated it would seem by a total conception of Empire. To Lincoln, states, like individuals, were a part of the Union, and the Union might be broken neither by citizens nor by states.

The Revenue Act of 1942 marks a new high in American finance; in fact, it reaches a new high for any country. According to official estimates, which vary somewhat, in a full year of operation the new law will increase federal tax revenues by 7 or 8 billion dollars to 24 or 26 billion dollars. This is about 50 per cent more than would have been received if the existing law had not been changed, and four times as much as the greatest tax measure of World War I. Eightelevenths of the estimated increase is to come from income taxes on individuals; two-elevenths from taxes on incomes of corporations; and nearly one-eleventh from excises on liquor, tobacco, freight charges, etc. (See Table 4).

Executive Reorganization. In long and highly controversial opinions, the majorities of the Indiana and Louisiana supreme courts invalidated state administrative reorganization plans of a type whose constitutionality might conceivably have been treated as political questions. The Indiana controversy grew out of the repeal, over a Democratic governor's veto, of the Executive-Administrative Act of 1933. In place of an administration consolidated into eight departments, each directly responsible to the governor, the Republican legislative majority substituted an organization of four departments—state, audit and control, treasury, public works and commerce—each headed by a hybrid board composed of the governor and two elective administrative officers, or one administrative officer, the governor, and the lieutenant-governor. Existing tenures were terminated and powers of appointment were expressly given to the respective three-man boards.

Upon adjournment of the legislature, this sweeping “reorganization” was immediately attacked on the grounds that it wrested authority from the governor and unconstitutionally delegated executive power to ministerial officers. Operation of the acts was enjoined in the lower court. On appeal, a divided supreme court declared the repealing statute unconstitutional. The heart of the majority opinion was the syllogism that under the Indiana constitution executive power, “including the administrative,” is vested, not in the executive department, but in the governor; that the appointive function is an exercise of the executive power; and hence only the governor may appoint.

Next to Hegel and Nietzsche, Fichte is the German philosopher most frequently blamed as one of the principal inspirers of the National Socialist ideologies of state despotism and the superiority of the German people. Indeed, it is not difficult to find in Fichte's work any number of passages which might be interpreted in such a way as to corroborate these views. In the writings of his middle period, around 1800, Fichte arrives at a despotism of reason which in its practical application might be even more consistently restraining than the rule of our modern dictators. In his programmatic speeches for the restoration of the German nation, he ascribes to his people a divine mission which has shocked many of his interpreters. Therefore we cannot be surprised that historians who, in accordance with the demands of their profession, lay more stress on the effects of thoughts and actions than on the intentions which motivate them, attribute to Fichte a good share of responsibility for the ideology of the National Socialist party and its hold on the German people. Yet these historians are right only with regard to the external form, while the intended aims of the two systems of thought are diametrically opposed to one another.

On the whole, Fichte is a moral idealist whose principal concerns are the political and inner freedom of the individual, the right and duty of the individual to contribute his best to the welfare and the cultural progress of his nation, the independence of all nationalities, social security, and an acceptable standard of living for every human being. These demands are based on a genuine respect for the dignity of man and the desire to contribute to the rule of humanitarian values in all human relations. The National Socialist, on the contrary, is fundamentally an egotistic materialist, a ruthless Herrenmensch, with a deep-rooted contempt for freedom, equality, and all humanitarian values.

The membership of the Supreme Court underwent but one change during the 1940 term. Mr. Justice McReynolds retired on February 1, 1941. Chief Justice Hughes retired on June 2, 1941, after the term had closed. The vacancies thus created were both filled during the summer recess. Mr. Justice McReynolds, a Tennessee Democrat, was Attorney-General in President Wilson's first cabinet, and was appointed to the Court in 1914. He has long been rated one of the most conservative of the justices and was a consistent and bitter opponent of the New Deal and all its works. Mr. Justice Van Devanter, who had retired in 1937, died on February 8, 1941.

Under our Constitution, the national administration is an agent of the people acting through the Congress and the President. The legislature determines policies, establishes or authorizes the creation of administrative agencies, appropriates funds for their work, and attempts to control their operations by directions and limitations before and checks after the administration acts. But the establishment of controls at once effective and not unduly restrictive has become increasingly difficult as the business of government, legislative as well as administrative, has expanded and become more technical. Consultation with and advice to administrative agencies by citizens and their organizations are important, but they supplement rather than supplant legislative control, which remains the principal means for supervising the administration. The standard works on public administration discuss methods of control, but do not deal in detail with this relation between legislatures and particular agencies. The present analysis of congressional control of the Work Projects Administration has been undertaken in the belief that “case studies” may be useful for verification, modification, or contradiction of general propositions about legislative control of administration.

In 1835, Southerners were alarmed and indignant at the growing practice on the part of Northern Abolitionists of mailing incendiary Abolitionist literature into the Southern slaveholding states, and were casting about for some effective method of dealing with this menace to their “peculiar institution.” The memory of Nat Turner's insurrection was still fresh in many Southern minds, and the circulation of such literature as the Abolitionists were sending through the federal mails might, if the practice were not checked, result in an even more destructive uprising of the slaves. In Charleston, on July 29, the postoffice was forcibly broken into and a mass of literature found there was publicly burned. This sort of action was hardly, however, a satisfactory solution of the problem.

In August, 1787, while the Convention at Philadelphia was deliberating upon the commerce clause, the delegates witnessed a demonstration of John Fitch's steamboat, propelled uncertainly against the current of the Delaware. In the development of American federalism it may seem that technology—of which Fitch's steamboat will for the moment serve as a symbol—has counted for more than what the statesmen in Independence Hall worked out on paper for the distribution of power between state and nation. This is not to bespeak for poor John Fitch a niche beside the fifty-five founders; steam would have produced its centralizing effect upon economy and government even had there been no contribution by Fitch—who was, moreover, a cantankerous anti-Federalist in politics. I mention the coincidence merely to suggest that ingenious men invent and enterprising men initiate shifts in the nation's economy, and that the institutions of federalism have to adjust themselves to the resultant thrusts and resistances in the social medium. It is only at the end of the cycle that there comes a decision by the Supreme Court holding that the state had full power to act in the premises, or that the matter belonged exclusively to Congress, or that the command of the state was enforceable until Congress broke its silence.

Rarely in history has a legislative body been confronted with problems, the implications of which are so far-reaching, the solutions of which are so important to civilization, as is the present American Congress. The questions with which the Seventy-seventh Congress has to cope include national defense, civil liberties in times of crisis, fundamental labor policies, forms of taxation, and possibly monetary standards.