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    Publishing Information

    Issues and Men

    By Oswald Garrison Villard

    The Nation
    August 7, 1937
    Vol. 145, No. 6, P. 152

  1. Senator Hiram Johnson, the former Bull-Mooser, long considered a dangerous radical, cried out "Glory be to God" when he was told that the Supreme Court bill was finally shelved. If I cannot be as dramatic as the Senator, I cannot deny my happiness at the result for various reasons. None of them will seem valid to those who are able to perceive in the opposition to the President's measure merely a desire to strike indirectly at labor and the whole New Deal program; who believe that the hue and cry was solely due to Big Business machinations, to the utterly discredited Republican Party machine, and to the capitalistic daily press: who felt that all the liberals who opposed the proposal had either become senile, like myself, or had been bought, or gone bad out of innate, if hitherto hidden, depravity.

  2. While I have never been among those who accused Mr. Roosevelt of seeking to be a dictator or believed it, there can be no question that the road to dictatorship was opened wide by Congress in the first two years of his administration. Indeed, it has never been denied that seventy-seven new powers and authorities were conferred upon him in the first one hundred days of his rule, and that despotic economic powers no one ever dreamed of bestowing upon an American president were given to him when Congress was too terrified to do else than vote the bills he asked for without even stopping to read them. I hold it, therefore, in these days of incipient fascism a cause for congratulation that Congress has exercised its constitutional right to make its will supreme, for better or for worse.

  3. It must not be forgotten that no one in House or Senate proposed this legislation or had a hand in drafting it. It was secretly prepared and sprung upon the Congress in a manner to raise a question of vast importance—whether the President shall allocate to himself the law-drafting initiative and then demand that his party majority pass it, and back his demand with all the tremendous power of patronage which he wields. Leadership we ask and expect in the President, of course, and the right to recommend measures whenever he sees fit. But to draft such a bill as this in secret without any public demand for it—when he declared the people gave him a mandate for this legislation in the last election he certainly misstated the facts—and then seek to jam it through by cracking the party whip, that is a procedure which if frequently or regularly repeated will lead directly to the downfall of Congress and again open the path to a dictator.

  4. I am pleased by the President's defeat because I believe it will put a crimp in the third-term talk so glibly voiced by Governor Earle and others. If there ever was a time in our history when the country should hold fast to the two-term tradition, it is now. Yet I have before me a letter in the Wisconsin Progressive which demands the renomination of Roosevelt for a third term because we have no one else to turn to! When General Grant tried for a third term people were sufficiently aroused to put an end to that aspiration of the victor of Appomattox, which was then only eleven years in the past. Then there was no such world-wide drift to fascism, no such hot impatience with democratic government as has affected many Americans today. There were not many serious domestic issues, although much indignation at the corruption of the Grant regime; but none the less, the revolt against any third term was widespread and effective. If Mr. Roosevelt should make the dreadful mistake of seeking to run again—I am confident that he is far too great a patriot to consider it—I for one should expect to campaign against him by day and by night as for the very life of the Republic.

  5. Again I rejoice that the vote to shelve the Supreme Court proposal was so overwhelming—seventy to twenty—for it proves the truth of what has been said by the opposition, that really only a handful of Senators were, like Senator La Follette, sincerely for the bill. A close vote would have led to all sorts of charges. It is now established beyond refutation that the bulk of the Senators were opposed, and those who were going along merely because of parry loyalty took advantage of the first opportunity to throw off their party bonds. My next heresy is that I feel that this affords proof that public opinion can still be aroused and, if aroused, can control. There will be many to hoot at this and say that it was all cooked up and bought by reactionaries and Republican politicians who saw a chance to hit the President effectively at last. Perhaps so. I can only affirm my honest dissent from that on the basis of forty years of experience in observing and gauging public opinion.

  6. So what? Well, I know exactly what. It is up to us who opposed the President's measure but who have always favored the curbing of the Supreme Court's veto power to demonstrate that we are sincere in our demand that Congress shall be free to exercise the same right to legislate along lines of social and economic advancement and security that inheres in every other parliament which is still intact and unchained. I have already been asked whether I would heed a call for a convention to start the fight for an amendment and to marshal the arguments which seem to me unanswerable. How I wish that the President would come forward, admit his defeat, and work for such an amendment! In my judgment it could then be got quickly. But whether he does or does come along, the demand for the amendment must make itself felt at once.