Howard Crawley Memorial Lectures 9781512814927

Table of contents :
FOREWORD
CONTENTS
WHERE ARE THE DEMOCRACIES GOING?
POLLS OF PUBLIC OPINION AND WHAT THEY SHOW
OBJECTIVES OF ORGANIZED LABOR
CAN WAR BE AVERTED?

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HOWARD CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES (Wharton

Assembly

Addresses)

HOWARD CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES !939 BY R A Y M O N D LESLIE GEORGE

BUELL

GALLUP

R O B E R T J. C L A R E N C E K.

WATT STREIT

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS Philadelphia 1 939

Copyright 1939 UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

Manufactured

in the United

States of

America

FOREWORD

T

HE Wharton Assemblies were inaugurated in 1934-35 by the Faculty of the Wharton School and the Wharton Association in an effort to bring before the student body of the School distinguished and representative men to discuss current topics of economic, political, and social interest. A t the time of their beginning and during the intervening years before her death, it was the desire of the donor, whose generosity made possible this lecture series, that her name remain unknown. However, in the fall of last year her life ended and with her passing the wish, as set forth in her will, that these lectures become a memorial to her husband has been fulfilled. T h e Wharton Assemblies no longer exist by that name, but have become known as the Howard Crawley Memorial Lectures established by Mrs. Ethel Crawley in memory of her husband. During the past year the attention of the American people has been focused in good part on international affairs and in particular on the happenings in the European countries. It was therefore quite fitting that two of our Howard Crawley Memorial Lectures should be on topics related to the developments in Europe, and a third should be concerned with a solution of those problems facing not only the democracies of Europe but of America as well. " T h e Economic and Political Dilemma of Central Europe," the address delivered by Heinrich Bruening, former Chancellor of Germany, is omitted from this publication, however—an omission which he requested. T h e purpose of the Howard Crawley Memorial Lectures being to present topics of current public interest, it was not inappropriate that one of our speakers should discuss with v

C R A W L E Y MEMORIAL LECTURES us the important part that public opinion is playing in public affairs and the methods by which it is measured and evaluated. A fifth in our series of lectures was devoted to the work of the organized labor movement. It is a pleasure to have this opportunity to express for the Faculty and for the Student Body of the School the appreciation that is felt for the contribution of our guest speakers to the success of the Howard Crawley Memorial Lectures during the past year. A L F R E D H. W I L L I A M S ,

June i, 1939 Philadelphia,

Pennsylvania

Dean

CONTENTS W H E R E ARE T H E DEMOCRACIES Raymond Leslie Buell

GOING?, by

POLLS OF PUBLIC OPINION AND W H A T T H E Y SHOW, by George Gallup OBJECTIVES OF ORGANIZED LABOR, by Robert J . Watt CAN WAR BE AVERTED?, by Clarence K. Streit

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WHERE ARE THE DEMOCRACIES GOING? by Raymond Leslie B u e l l 1

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HE last two months have been among the most stirring of history. During the Munich crisis we were led up to a peak, over which we saw the apparition of a world war. W e heaved a sigh of relief when peace was made, but as we watched the news from day to day, it became quite clear that that peace was made upon terms which represent a great victory for Hitler and the German Dictatorship. It is not too much to say that the great French and British democracies capitulated without a fight. T h e immediate issue was Czechoslovakia, the fate of three and a half million Germans there, but the more far-reaching issue was control of the rest of Europe, possibly the rest of the world. It is too soon yet to tell how Germany is going to use its new position and its new power, but we know that Hitler has won his greatest success and France and Britain have accepted their greatest defeat. I should like to ask why it is that France and Britain in this particular case capitulated, why is it that the democracies of the world, including our own, seem to be going down to defeat, while the dictators are going ahead. As far as the immediate Munich crisis is concerned, the first reason why France and Britain were unwilling to fight over that particular issue was strategic. Even now, France and Britain have a great superiority in raw materials. i President of the Foreign Policy Association. A Howard Crawley Memorial Lecture delivered before the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce of the University of Pennsylvania, November 29, 1938.

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2 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES Their navies, particularly if they can count eventually on us, still control the seas. Their industrial power, their war potential, are certainly greater than that of Germany and Italy, and I think once war should come the people in the democracies would show greater staying power than the people in the dictatorships. It was probable, therefore, that had the French and British decided to fight, and particularly if they could have relied upon our market for raw materials, they would have won the war. Why, then, did they not fight, particularly since Germany seems since Munich on the point of remedying its deficiencies in raw materials by dominating the whole of Central Europe? Well, the strategic reason why they did not fight was that although they might eventually have won the war, the first victory undoubtedly would have gone to Germany. German troops could have occupied Czechoslovakia in three or four weeks, and the French troops, meanwhile, could do nothing except hurl themselves against the new German forts. Eventually, possibly after a year, the French troops and tanks might have broken through this new Siegfried line, but in the process possibly two million French soldiers would have been lost and France at least for a period would have had to fight that war virtually alone. In 1914 the British could send only six divisions to France. This time, in view of the state of the British Army and the situation in Palestine, Britain could send only two divisions. As you know, there is talk today of conscription in Britain, but in the absence of such an army, France would have had to fight that war alone for a long time against Germany, and the French were unwilling to take the punishment involved and submit to the terrific biological loss in man power which France was in no position to suffer. You ask, "How about Russia?" Well, even admitting that Russia is strong and united internally, which is a matter of dispute, if you look at the map you will find that

THE DEMOCRACIES 3 Russia can get to Czechoslovakia, as far as its troops are concerned, only by going across Rumania on a single-track railroad, which has very limited capacity. Rumania probably would have allowed those troops to pass if it could have settled the Bessarabia question, but France knew that Soviet Russia, no matter how loudly it might talk, could not move many divisions, let along army corps to the Czechoslovakian frontier in the immediate future. Russia could help in the air. Britain could help in the air, and the saying in Prague was that for every German plane that bombards us, there will be three planes bombarding Germany. No one knows what effect such bombardments would have had upon civilians, but it is evident that unless you have troops which can follow up an air raid, aviation in itself is of no real military decisive importance. In contrast, the City of London, not to mention the City of Paris, lives in deadly fear of an air raid. London itself had only one hundred anti-aircraft guns. Planes now fly at an elevation of twenty-five thousand feet. They may not hit the military objective, but they can demoralize civilian population and industry. Some Englishmen say that although Berlin and Paris might be destroyed by aircraft, the national life of Germany and France will go on, but if London is destroyed from the air, the nerve center of England is cut and the life of England stopped. Now that may be an exaggeration, but there is no doubt that the British public is literally terrified by this fear of air raids. I don't know whether we can blame them, when you remember the terrific sensation of the American public here, only Sunday night, over the fantastic broadcast of a "War from Mars." There is no doubt that the whole world is in the jitters, and when you have a form of government which can keep its nerve, regardless of what its people feel underneath, that government has an immdiate striking advantage which a democracy does not have.

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CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES T o summarize, the British and the French, although eventually they probably would have won this war, were not willing to take the immediate terrible punishment involved over the issue o£ Czechoslovakia. They were not sure that the downfall of Czechoslovakia would mean German mastery of Central Europe. They preferred to take a chance and wait and see. Now a second reason for the declining influence of the democracies is the population question. It is a striking fact that in the western democracies the birth rate is slowing down. A government report in Sweden recently published a three-hundred-page study which shows that Sweden has increased its standard of living by virtue of the fact that about half of the families have only one child, or no children at all. And this report points out that in order to maintain the existing level of population, Sweden will have to increase its birth rate by 30%. You know what the situation is in France. France, which at the time of Louis X I V had the largest population in Europe, today has only forty million people in contrast to Germany, which has eighty million. T h e statisticians calculate that unless the trend is reversed, the population of these democracies, including England and France, is going to move toward extinction during the next several hundred years. If you go to Germany you will find an extremely interesting contrast. In the latter days of the German Republic, the birth rate had fallen to the second lowest in Europe. The people lacked confidence in the future. Children were not wanted, and the German population curve was going down in an alarming way. Hitler saw that the real fate of Germany was involved; and one of the most striking accomplishments of the Nazi régime is that it has succeeded in checking that decline and in increasing the birth rate of Germany from about fourteen per thousand to eighteen per thousand in the last three years, probably one of the

T H E DEMOCRACIES 5 most striking and dramatic shifts in vital statistics of which history is aware. Nazi Germany has reduced its birth deficit from about 30% to 1 1 % . How have the Nazis done this? The economists say it is because of economic policy. It is true that the Nazis have instituted a loan system under which a newly married couple can borrow up to one thousand marks without interest, and for every child which is born of the union, onequarter of the loan is canceled. That explains about a third of the population increase, but the surprising thing is that couples who have been married a long time are beginning again to have children. This may be partly due to German economy, but it is also due to the sentiment of a new Germany which has given this nation a new reason for living. They say, "We have got confidence in the future. Germany is not going to die. We think there is a world ahead of us in which Germany is going to play a great role, and we are willing to make material sacrifices to procreate." Here is a contrast, I think, which explains why the western democracies inevitably must lose part of their past world preponderance. But this does not mean that the Germans are necessarily going to dominate Europe, because if you go to the east to Poland and to Rumania, or if you go to Russia, you will find that the Slavic peoples are increasing far more rapidly even than the Germans. Taking Europe as a whole, before i960 there will be a total increase of population of about one hundred million. And when you consider the fact that Europe is already overpopulated, that this new increase of one hundred million must be fed, and when you consider the fact that Europe is divided up into twenty-five almost air-tight quarreling suspicious groups, you can understand why, unless a new politics is developed, that continent is to become subject to a series of successive explosions. Here is an issue of domestic and of international importance. For with the decline of the population of the

6 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES western democracies, the international balance o£ power inevitably must shift toward the nations who have the largest families, and that is the reason why the western democracies have not been able to maintain their own position in the international world. The third reason why the democracies have weakened and why, in many countries, it is a question whether democracy itself will survive is because of what I call the "social problem." For example, in this country, before the World War, government was used by the New England and the Pennsylvania manufacturers for the purpose of getting certain privileges in the form of high tariffs. Railroads got certain privileges in the form of subsidies and land grants. So long as those subsidies were confined to a small privileged group, the economic system could adjust itself and continue to produce. But as a result of what we call "democracy," every group is organizing and saying, "We have to get the same privileges from government as these few manufacturers got in the past." This movement for making privilege universal also occurred in Germany under the Republic, and it is still strong in France. The workers say, and certainly they are entitled to great sympathy, "We have a very hard life. We see people spending great fortunes who are the owners of capital. We think that we ought to have equality of opportunity, and we want a larger share of the world's goods." But the difficulty, particularly in this post-war period, is that the liberals and the workers, who shout about the redistribution of wealth, have failed to realize that before you can give wealth away you have got to produce it; and in Germany and France, and I think it is somewhat true here, they have succeeded in getting control of the government and in enacting social legislation of a type and of a severity which may destroy the prospect of profit. If we are going to keep the capitalist system, it is quite evident that capitalists and investors will perform their

T H E DEMOCRACIES 7 duties only when there is a prospect of a return. There is no doubt in my mind that the demand of German labor unions, during the last days of the Republic, for a larger and larger proportion of the national income, which was declining all the time, produced a crisis which drove the employer into the arms of Fascism. You have a more recent example in France in the forty-hour week. In theory it is a perfectly sensible idea, but in fact the law was framed so hastily and applied so universally that it made many employers close down because they simply could not operate at a profit. As a result of this social problem the industrial production of France today is still about 2 5 % below what it was in 1929. When you add to these demands, which in themselves are not illegitimate, the fact that many members of these unions are Communists, who profess to believe in an entirely different system, who profess to favor a revolution, which in Russia has led to the liquidation of the capitalist class, to the cutting of throats and assassination, you have a new cause of lack of confidence. I am not a Red baiter, but it is my observation that the reason why the conservative class in France and Britain has not been willing to stand up against Hitler and defend what in the past would be regarded as national interests is because of this fear of Communism. These people say, "Well, if there is a danger here at home from a Red revolt, or if it is impossible to operate our factories and invest our capital without the constant fear of expropriation, there may be something in what Hitler and Mussolini have done in their nations." Both in Germany and Italy, they have smashed the labor unions, prohibited the right to strike, converted the workers' groups into government and company unions, giving them many privileges, giving them security, abolishing unemployment, but making them cogs in a machine where they have no independent rights of their own. It is this social problem that not only

8 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES interferes with production, but which brings with it the fear of Communism, which explains why the conservative class throughout Europe has looked with a good deal of sympathy upon Fascism and dictatorship. T h e moral to us is not that we should favor Nazism. T h e moral to us is that the labor movement should decide, as I think the British and Swedish labor movements have decided, that the unions have more to gain by endeavoring to make reforms within the existing democratic and capitalist system than they have by attempting to overthrow the system, because the middle class in every country except Russia will turn to Fascism before it will accept Communism. T h e labor movement, furthermore, must realize that while there are certain things it may extract from industry producing at its present level, their welfare, as well as the welfare of other groups, depends upon developing a system which increases production at the same time as it redistributes wealth through means of social security and wage agreements. T h e social problem, then, has created a very serious issue in certain democracies. It is not nearly as serious in England and Sweden because of the intelligence of the cooperatives and because of the willingness of the labor classes to realize these principles which I mentioned. But the problem is serious in France and certainly it offers dangers to us in this country. In addition to this social problem, we have a financial problem. As a result of world-wide social developments, every democratic government is carrying in its budget very large charges for social legislation. In every democracy today governments feel an obligation to take care of the unemployed through relief. Every government has social insurance and old-age pensions. In Great Britain and France these sums run to colossal figures. They could be borne,

T H E DEMOCRACIES 9 provided industrial production and national income increased, but the tragic situation today is the fact that in addition to paying these colossal sums for social charges, the democracies are bearing equally colossal sums for rearmament. The British have a rearmament program calling for an expenditure of more than seven and a half billion dollars. The French today have a budget, if my recollection is correct, of a hundred billion francs, of which forty billion is met by borrowing. As a result of this combined burden of social charges and rearmament, the democracies all over the world, not to mention the dictatorships, have had to resort to deficit financing. Britain staved it off longer than anybody else, but Britain has now commenced. Now the dictatorships can resort to deficit financing and at the same time keep confidence, avoid inflation, and get production going. How does a dictator do that? The dictator does it by virtually telling the business man that you have to invest your money here and there and there. In Germany the saying is "Lack of confidence is verboten." But under democratic capitalism, when you get deficit financing, as we have in France and America, the capitalist becomes frightened. He says, "Inflation is coming. There is no chance to profit"; with the result that in France you have had a flight of capital, a perfectly enormous flight of capital to England and America, and in America you have had what some people call a strike of capital. We haven't known where to send the money, but have kept it in our banks and haven't invested it. The necessity of increasing the budget to meet social charges and rearmament, accompanied by more and more deficit financing, intensifies this lack of confidence which is undermining the system of voluntary capitalist production. When that goes beyond a certain point a movement in favor of a totalitarian economy is bound to arise, which

10 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES says, " W e have got to put this money to work, and if it will not go to work by the old means of voluntary discretion, government has got to step in with a club." Now France has been weakened because of the combination of all these internal factors. But France realizes the danger and is endeavoring to enact reforms bringing back the country to a modified form of economic liberalism. Nevertheless I think there is a very real danger that, to meet this continuing burden of rearmament and social charges, even though there isn't a war, France and Britain are going to move into some sort of a totalitarian régime. I am inclined to think that, while we will not go as fast as England, this country may go after France does, not for international reasons so much as for purely internal causes. T h e r e is no excuse for America moving in this direction, but we have to develop far more intelligence and discipline than we have shown in the past if we are to maintain our traditional institutions. These are the internal reasons why democracy is weakening all over the world. There is a further reason which I wish to mention, although it is delicate to speak of it in the superficial age in which we are living. I am inclined to think that the fundamental cause of the lack of confidence in the idea of liberalism is partly philosophical or metaphysical. During the much-despised Victorian age liberalism rested on the idea that man was a creature of dignity. He had a rational power of choice between what we called "good" and "evil." Men believed there was a moral purpose in living. T h a t attitude has largely disappeared all over Europe, and I think it has disappeared in our universities here and our intellectual circles to a large extent. W e have been told by modern science that man is nothing more than an animal. We are told that a deterministic outlook on life is the only tenable outlook; that each one of us is simply a leaf carried along on a great tidal wave of water, not able to control its destiny. W e have been told

THE DEMOCRACIES 11 by a new type of scientist, Mr. Freud, that all human actions are ultimately conditioned by the unconscious, which cannot be controlled. T h e worker and intellectual have been told by Karl Marx that man is not a creature of reason, or ideas, but simply a reflection of economic environment. As a result of all these doctrines, and there is an element of truth in all of them, we have lost that conception of purpose which was the basis of nineteenth-centurydemocracy liberalism. There was a time when some men said that death was preferable to slavery. But if you accept these new ideas, the very fact of human existence is slavery itself, so why get excited about Hitler? T h e conception of honor and sacrifice and—to use a very old-fashioned word—sin has disappeared from a large part of the western world; we have become sophisticated. I am afraid that the result has been to create a great void in the mass of human beings. When they enter periods of despondency and have nothing to cling to, they rush toward a new saviour. I think the soundest interpretation of what has happened in Russia and Germany and Italy is that these régimes are political religions to these people, which with their brutality and primitivism have given them a new sense of integration and will to live. There is an element of truth in that diagnosis. When liberalism becomes nothing more than a competition for profit, when liberty becomes an end in itself rather than a means to an end, a spiritual miasma is produced, against which sooner or later the masses revolt, and run after fortune-tellers, or dictators, offering them a new creed. There is no doubt that both Germany and Italy have found a new synthesis, a new integration, although they have paid a terrible price. They have invoked tribal symbolisms and falsehoods in order to get this national unity. They have played upon human gullibility, but they have got a result and it is giving them a terrific power at the very time when democracies are showing weakness.

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CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES Now I do not know what the answer to this problem is, but I do believe that unless we can associate with the conception of liberty a conception of purpose, each man deciding for himself how he shall serve his brothers—unless we can restore that conception in the democracies, we shall lack the metaphysical or philosophical foundation which is necessary for survival. I see on every side signs of re-creation, particularly in France, to a lesser extent in England and to a certain extent here, but whether or not these forces working for recreation will come soon enough to check the process of disintegration, I don't know. That leads me to say a few words about America. What does Munich mean to us? Well, again, it is too soon to say. However, I think two things are evident. First, as the result of the capitulation of France and England, the danger to the security, not of the United States itself, perhaps, but of the Western Hemisphere has increased. So long as the French and British held the Germans back in Europe, there was no danger of German aggression in Latin America. Now that they have capitulated, I think the Germans and Italians will be tempted to go ahead. I doubt whether they will attack Latin America, but certainly they are going to intrigue against us down there, and they are going to dump their goods at 30% or 40% below the selling price that America can offer, and make up the difference at home. A friend of mine, visiting Brazil, reports that the Germans there have a plan of revolting or at least assisting Brazilians to revolt in the three southern provinces of Brazil, creating an independent state and applying to the German Government for protection, which would be immediately extended. That would be a nice thing for Mr. Hull when it comes along. I think, certainly, the security of the United States has been weakened, the Monroe Doctrine has been weakened,

T H E DEMOCRACIES

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by the events in Europe, although I don't know how much. In the second place, the second effect of Munich on America is that the temptation to resort on the one hand to increased deficit financing, and on the other hand to increased self-containment, is going to increase. And those two things together, I am of the opinion, may enhance the necessity of government intervention from Washington. We may adopt more and more severe control of agriculture, in order to take the place of what used to be exported, and we are going to get, I am afraid, what some of our left-wing people in Washington advocate, the extension of similar control over industry. So-called isolation in a world of tension means increased public investment and state competition. Furthermore, I think there is a certainty of increased armament, upon which almost everybody is agreed. But arms cost money, and instead of having a budget deficit this year of 13,000,000,000 or whatever it is, we may see it go up next year, instead of seeing it reduced. I believe we have got to have certain types of government intervention, but I am afraid of a certain type of control, administered by a bureaucracy, which endeavors to say to the farmer and to the business man how much he shall produce and at what price. T h a t is a system of economy you have in the Fascist state, but when maladjustments accumulate beyond a certain point, it is a type of economy which is bound to arise even though the price is heavy. It is a system of economy which fits into a pattern of rearmament and which usually means the end of democracy. I am afraid that under our type of democracy, where we lack parties who stand for the general good and where politics consists largely of a war of sectional and limited pressure groups, self-sufficiency will mean more and more intense, internal competition for government favors. Selfsufficiency will mean that the Government will have to take over the entire South and reorganize it, because the

i4 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES South still depends upon the export of cotton. But if the government fences in the South with subsidies, New England and the North are going to be angry. While I believe in government intervention for certain purposes, I have come to the conclusion that a planned economy, in the sense of an economy in which government regulates production, output, prices, and wages, means increased sectionalism with the possible fear of dictatorship. There is no doubt that if the Government bureaucracy endeavors to direct production, it cannot be hampered by parliamentary debate or freedom of discussion. I don't say that this danger is imminent—but it certainly has been increased here since Munich. How can we avoid these tendencies? That is a very difficult question. I think we ought to endeavor to balance this budget of ours and finance rearmament, if need be, by a special tax. But that is only the beginning of the problem, for I don't think we can get an increase of national income large enough to balance the budget purely through extravagant government spending. I hope that as a result of the monopoly investigation in Washington, we can arrive at a principle that goods should be produced in this country upon a basis of competition. If prices have to be administered, as the economist says, they should be administered so as to increase the production of goods at low prices, rather than restrict the production for the sake of a high profit and a high price. One reason why I have believed in the Hull program is that it does symbolize the competitive principle of economic life, which I think is intimately connected with the preservation of political democracy. I realize the importance of government intervention to fix the rules of the game. I believe that there are some industries where government ownership may be desired, but I am convinced from studying democracy in Europe and also here that, unless we can transfer from the government

T H E DEMOCRACIES 15 to the market most of the decisions affecting our every-day economic life, we are bound to build up a bureaucracy which will end in dictatorship. A free market is not a popular term, and it is not exact but, subject to that qualification, I think there is a relationship between the free market and democracy. A third thing which rather worries me since Munich is the possibility of standardizing a public opinion which easily becomes almost hysterical. You know the remarkable reaction to the broadcast of that fantasy by Orson Welles over the Columbia Broadcasting System the other night. People actually thought we were being invaded from Mars. I am told that the War Department is being deluged daily with requests from cities and towns of the Middle West and other parts of the country for anti-aircraft protection. We already develop a jittery feeling whenever there is prospect of invasions. You can imagine what the situation will become should a general war break out in Europe; I am afraid that in order to secure a psychological release, the pressures pushing America into that war will be almost impossible to resist. We talk about propaganda in 1914 to 1916, but the possibility of propaganda and of standardizing American opinion has been infinitely increased by the radio and newspaper columnism. We now have instrumentalities in which ideas can be projected to millions of people without any real opportunity of analysis or reply. Radio after radio program denounces Nazi Germany, but how many opportunities are given the Nazis to reply? I am as much opposed to Nazism as anybody in this country, but this does not lead me to overlook the fact that under modern conditions any great emotional issue can hardly be debated fairly. The progress of propaganda, I think, has immeasurably increased. I do not wish to be pessimistic. We should all be thankful that we live in America today. This country is still the

16 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES freest country in the world, with the highest standard of living, with the greatest opportunity. But let us keep America as it has been, while removing its defects. While the remedy for the defects of our democracy is more and better democracy, we must do more than issue platitudes about it. I feel that the best guarantee of democracy in this country is the restoration of a competitive economy under which the market should be made to function so as to bring about the reduction of prices and the allocation of wealth in accordance with the needs of people rather than an economy which is controlled by government and in which detailed economic decisions are not made by the market but on the floors of Congress. The nature of our future economic system is bound up with the development of our democratic process. Difficult as it may be, we should endeavor to build in this country political parties and groups who will arise above the petty corruption of our municipal and state politics, and recognize that government has become the most important business of the American people. Our best young men should enter political and administrative life and we should build up groups, less interested in getting protection for this industry or that group, than in building a country which guarantees minimum social needs, but which will give every man his chance to develop in accordance with his own capacity. Finally, I think, and this is the most difficult of all, we need a foreign policy which will be strong, which will miss no opportunity to ease world tensions on the one hand and to resist, in so far as we are able, the attack of aggressors on the other. That means an extension of Mr. Hull's program of trade agreements brought to a climax last week by the Anglo-American agreement. It means a policy of endeavoring to create, for a part of the world at least, an area where trade could be resumed and where investment once more can flow.

T H E DEMOCRACIES 17 We have been told by American economists that there is no longer any opportunity for private capital investment because the frontier has disappeared. But only recently I have been to Poland, a country of forty million people able to work, willing to work, yet a people which has a constantly deteriorating standard of living because they cannot export in order to pay for the imports which they need. Poland is in need of foreign capital to give it the equipment which we obtained before the World War by means of foreign capital. But under the existing international system, that country is doomed to progressive stagnation. It is symbolic of what is happening to the rest of the world —one country deeply in need, while over here are millions and millions of dollars of idle capital unwilling, unable to go to work. That is a tragedy of the modern world, and I do not believe that the future of American democracy will be safe unless it can do something to overcome this type of so-called isolation, unless it can do something to bring order and justice into the world as a whole.

POLLS OF PUBLIC OPINION AND WHAT THEY SHOW by George Gallup 1

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invited me to come over and talk to you people two years ago. That was the week before the 1936 election. It was at a time when I was in a state of jitters. As a matter of fact, one columnist said I was sick with nervous indigestion, and that was a fairly truthful statement, because the 1936 election was the first big test that the Institute of Public Opinion had to meet. I wasn't certain at all as to how we should meet it. I come to you today with a little more self-composure. What I should like to do is to tell you something about how we measure public opinion and some of the things that we have found. I am not going to attempt to define public opinion, but I do want to describe it. I think you will recognize as well as I that what people think puts governments in and out of office, starts and stops wars, sets the tone of fashion and morality, makes and breaks heroes. I should like to quote James Bryce, author of The American Commonwealth and certainly one of the greatest authorities on our form of democracy. In his book The American Commonwealth, which was written about 1890, Bryce made this statement. He said: " T h e obvious weakness of government by opinion is the difficulty of ascerEAN W I L L I T S

1 Director o£ the American Institute o£ Public Opinion. A H o w a r d Crawley Memorial Lecture delivered before the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce of the University of Pennsylvania, January 1 3 , 1939.

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20 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES taining it." 2 He went on to say, in that same book, that the next and final stage in a democracy would be reached when the will of the public could be known at all times, possibly without the need of voting machinery at all. We think that that state is rapidly being reached through the development of this new science of measuring public opinion. I should like to tell you a bit about the American Institute of Public Opinion, and what we are trying to do, and what part we have in the development of this infant science of measuring public opinion. The Institute regards itself as a fact-finding organization. Three years ago, when we started, the Democratic Party, and particularly Mr. Charles Michelson, thought that we were merely a device of the Republican Party— a trick to make people think that the Republican Party was stronger than it actually was. Later on in that same campaign the Republicans thought we had sold out to the Democrats, because we said that Roosevelt would win the election. Our work is underwritten by some eighty-five newspapers of all shades of political belief. We have newspapers that some of you would regard as conservative, and we have newspapers that are very liberal in their viewpoints. But the point is that we should have to be honest, even if we were inclined not to be, or else we should go out of existence. It would be sheer stupidity to be anything but honest, because we could be dishonest in a big way only once, and then there would be no more American Institute of Public Opinion. Now we call our method "the sampling referendum." It is simply a matter of polling a small group of people, a miniature electorate, which as nearly as we can make it reflects the views and the complexion of the larger public. We regard the prediction of elections merely as a necessary evil. We have never been able to see any great social 2 James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, Vol. II, p. 315.

POLLS OF PUBLIC OPINION 21 good from telling the public forty-eight hours in advance how the public will vote in any given election. But, on the other hand, elections serve as our only test of accuracy, and if it wasn't for the fact that we could predict with a fair degree of accuracy how the public will vote in any given election, we should have a hard time getting acceptance of our polls on issues of the day. But we feel that in reporting public sentiment on issues of the day we are making our greatest contribution. Now a word or two about accuracy. It is our goal to be within 3% or 4% of the true figure. We do not believe the time will ever come when a poll will be exactly right. By the very nature of things, perfect accuracy can only be charged to luck. Whenever our predictions come within 3% we think we are lucky. If they are over 3%, we believe we are unlucky. In our last five forecasts, we have been within 2%. We were 2% wrong in Kentucky, 2% in Georgia, 1 °/0 in Maryland and 11/2 % in South Carolina. In the New York Lehman-Dewey race, we were about wrong. But we take greatest credit of all in having predicted that seventy-five seats would be gained in the House of Representatives by the Republicans. As a matter of fact, I think there were some eighty-one seats taken by the Republicans. We had to work out new principles, a new set of methods, in order to make any prediction at all in that election, because we weren't able to work in all the 435 election districts in the country. Well, our goal, as I say, is to be within 3% of the true figure. I should like to say a word or two about the determinants of accuracy in any poll. We get hundreds of letters every year asking: "How many persons do you poll?" or "How can this be a national poll, when I have never received a ballot?" Frequently, when I talk to a group of people such as this, if there is a question-and-answer period, someone always stands up and says: "Has anyone in this room ever received a ballot?" Usually—well, about

22 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES half the time—one person has. T h e reason for such questions is simple. T h e Literary Digest polled many millions of people, and to the layman it is inconceivable that you can get an adequate cross-section of this country with as few as three thousand or ten thousand or fifty thousand interviews or ballots. W e have examined the history of polls in this country. My associate, Dr. Claude Robinson, wrote a book called Straw Votes, and in that he traced the history of straw votes and straw polls in this country. W e have never found one single instance of a poll going wrong because of the number of persons who cast their ballots or were interviewed—not one single instance. T h e Literary Digest made an error of some 19% in the last election. W e believe that if they had sent two reporters around Times Square to interview a couple of hundred persons they would have reduced their error by half. T h e Literary Digest sent out ten million ballots. T h e y got back, I think, in the neighborhood of 2,500,000. W e figure that only 1/10 of 1% or their nineteen-point error can be accounted for because of the number of persons polled. T h e size of the sample is relatively unimportant after a certain minimum number has been taken, and that minimum number is somewhere around three thousand. W e didn't invent the laws of probability. A great many people think we did, and unfortunately we can't repeal them. A man by the name of Bernoulli first set out the laws of probability in the year of 1713. Now you can establish them here in this room this afternoon—and maybe you have in your classrooms—by flipping pennies. W e know that the chances are 997 in one thousand that we can be within 3% of the true figure if we take as few as two thousand cases, if, of course, the cross-section is perfect. I am assuming now that we are dealing only with a factor of size. You can take as few as two thousand cases

POLLS OF PUBLIC OPINION

23

and be within 3%. Of course, you increase that accuracy as you add cases, but the law of diminishing returns sets in about three thousand. With a million cases you would be more nearly accurate than with three thousand. But you can take only two thousand and be within 3%. So the size of the sample is relatively unimportant. T h e important thing is the people polled, the cross-section, and I should say that 95% of our efforts are devoted to that problem—the problem of selecting the proper sample, the proper cross-section. W e have to select the right number of people of different age levels. W e have to select the right number of farmers, of city people, of urban people. W e have to select the right number of people who regard themselves as Republicans or as Democrats. W e have to see that the right number of people in Pennsylvania are represented, the right number of people in Iowa or Ohio or Georgia. W e have to build this cross-section from a wealth of statistical data and election returns. What we try to do is to build a sample that is exactly like the whole. I am frequently asked why the Literary Digest went wrong. Now, I suppose many of you have seen explanations of why the Digest made their colossal error, and why the method which they had used every year up to 1936 proved unsuccessful in 1936. T h e reason was simply this. In 1932, with the advent of the New Deal, the division between the Haves and Have-nots really began. Up until that time you could find many Republicans in the lowest income levels, among workers, among union men. But beginning in 1932 came a cleavage between the Haves and Have-nots, and it is increasing every day. In the Congressional election last November we found that the people who voted against the New Deal and against Democratic congressmen were for the most part people in the higher income levels, so this cleavage which began with Mr. Roosevelt is continu-

24 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES ing. T h a t means, from our point of view, that it is most important to see that the lower levels are properly represented. Now, we started our experimental work in 1933, and by 1935 we were absolutely convinced that the Literary Digest would be wrong. W e talked to a great many editors, the editors who underwrite the work of the Institute, and told them that the Digest would be wrong. Many of them wouldn't believe it. W e thought that the best way to prove that we knew the Digest would be wrong was to predict what the Digest would find. If you will look in the papers for July 12, you will see that we predicted the Literary Digest would find Landon winning with about 56% of the major party vote. T h e next week Mr. Funk, the Digest's editor, sent a letter to all the editors of the country, in which he said that I was a crystal-gazer, that never before in the history of the Literary Digest had anyone attempted to tell them what they were going to find before they had sent out a single ballot. As a matter of fact, there was no crystal-gazing involved. T h e final figure of the Literary Digest was 57%. W e were 1 % wrong, which proves, incidentally, two things. It shows, first, that maybe we were lucky. But it also proves that the Literary Digest was honest. A good many people think the Digest was sold out to the Republican Party, which is of course an absurd assumption. T h e Digest was really doing what they thought was an honest and intelligent job. W e knew what they would find by a very simple procedure. A l l we had to do was to take a very small sample poll of the same people they were going to poll, in the same way. W e sent mail ballots to automobile owners and telephone subscribers, who roughly represent the upper half of the population, and read off the results that came from our tabulating machines. There we had their answers. T h e Digest used mail ballots, and there are a great many faults to be found in the mail ballot system. Students interested

POLLS OF PUBLIC OPINION 25 in marketing will be interested in this fact, because it has a bearing on all mail questionnaires. When we sent mail ballots to people in the upper brackets, we got a 50% response. When we sent them to people on relief we got a 5% response. People in the upper levels are more inclined to return them. People in the upper level embrace a large portion of the Republicans. When one hundred Republicans receive mail ballots, about 30 return them. When one hundred Democrats receive those same ballots, about 15 of them return them, so there was a constant error there. We used both mail ballots and interviews in that election, and we since have come to the interview system alone. We have some seven hundred investigators about the country, most of them college graduates, who work for us part-time. These people are assigned to cover so many people in their community each week. They do not interview the same people week after week; they are given a definite assignment as to whom to interview, but are not given names. For example, our investigator in Philadelphia might be assigned this week to cover 50 business executives, 50 persons on relief, and so on. He is not given the names of the people on relief or the business executives. He selects them at random. The wording of a question is important. It is not so important in an election, of course, as when we are dealing with issues. We have had to work out some interesting techniques in seeing whether the wording of the question influences the answer. One device we found to be very successful was what we call the split ballot. That is to say, we have two forms. If there is a discussion in our office as to whether a question should be worded this way or that way, we put the first form on the " A " ballot and the second form on the " B " ballot, and we know that if the difference in the results is greater than the difference due to the size of the sample, the wording has influenced the results. But typically, we find that a great deal of flexibility

26

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is permissible, that you get, on most issues, almost identical results, despite the fact that your wording may be different. If you change the main thought in the question you of course get different answers. In forecasting elections the timing of a survey is important. It might interest you to know that one of the many reasons why the Digest went wrong was the fact that it tested sentiment as of the first of September, whereas the election was not held until November, and people started shifting to Roosevelt and from Landon almost with Landon's first speech. T h e shift continued with increasing momentum. I think one of the most colossal blunders ever committed by a political party was the G.O.P. attack on social security in the last few days of the campaign. T h e Republicans were so stupid as not to know that even the rank and file of the Republican party was in favor of that Act. Now we think that we are making a very substantial contribution to good government. W e believe that we can help define the mandate of the people. Bryce observed that while an election of government officers is a sort of indirect referendum, it is not a satisfactory way of determining the public's judgment, because elections come only at distant intervals, and because it is impossible, or virtually impossible, to separate the popularity of the man and the popularity of the issue. Recall for a moment the plight of the Democrat in 1928 who wanted to vote for A1 Smith, and didn't want his vote interpreted as a vote to repeal Prohibition. Or, conversely, the plight of the Republican who wanted to vote for Hoover but didn't want his vote interpreted as a vote for the continuation of Prohibition. There is no question but that Herbert Hoover interpreted his great majority in 1928 as a mandate to continue Prohibition. I think there is no question but that Franklin D. Roosevelt interpreted his great majority in 1936 as a mandate to continue his

POLLS OF PUBLIC OPINION 27 liberal program, even if it meant circumventing the Supreme Court. A year before he made his proposal, we had polled the country on curbing the powers of the Court, and found the majority opposed. Three months before Roosevelt made his proposal we polled the country again on the same issue, and found the majority opposed. Every week the Supreme Court proposal was being debated we polled the country on this issue, and never once in all that time did we find a majority in favor of the President's proposal. As a matter of fact, when the discussion ended, the division between the people who were against it and for it was exactly the same as it had been three months before the President made his proposal. I don't know how many of you saw the musical comedy, Of Thee I Sing, but in one scene a man walked across the stage with a sign which read: "A Vote for Wintergreen is a Vote for Wintergreen," and that is just about as far as anyone can go in attempting to interpret the results of elections. Now we think we are making another contribution by increasing the interest of the masses in the issues of the day. We are providing what Walter Lippmann called in his book, Public Opinion, a "machinery of record." Suppose that in the field of sports we had no devices for scoring. Suppose at a baseball game you had no way of determining which team was ahead, how many scores had been made, how many men had come to bat, how many errors had been made. Or, in the case of a football game, suppose that you saw two teams march up and down the field, but you had to come away merely with the impression that one team was better than the other. I think if that were the case, the interest in sports would soon die. Now we believe that in the same sense, we are a sort of scorekeeper on the political issues of the day. We believe that the public will be more interested in the issues of the

28

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day if they know how various groups of people differed and what they think about these same issues. In the course of three years we have covered over one thousand issues. W e have polled the country on almost every conceivable subject, everything from Mrs. Roosevelt on down to the gold content of the dollar. W e have talked to hundreds of thousands of people—share-croppers, railroad men, farmers, colored people, bankers, lawyers, dentists. W e have talked to people in all walks of life. W e have had a chance to develop many interesting theories about the intelligence of the masses, but first let me tell you a story, one of my favorite stories. W e asked in one poll if people believed in life after death, and one old man, aged seventy-seven, answered the question this way: "I don't know, but I'll darn soon find out." W e asked a man down in Cincinnati if he believed in sterilization of the unfit. Somehow he got that confused with Lifebuoy Soap, and his answer was: "Sure, everybody ought to be sterilized." W e had a Maine interviewer, with the typical Maine accent, interviewing down in Georgia. As part of the routine of our questioning this interviewer was trying to find out from a Georgia farmer whether he owned an automobile. T h e interviewer asked in typical down-east fashion: "Do you own a cah?" T h e man said "Yes," and the interviewer then asked how old it was. He said " T w o years." "What make?" T h e farmer said, "Jersey." I think we are better fitted than anyone in the history of the country to pass judgment on the question of the intelligence of the masses. Are the people in this country, the common people, fit to govern themselves, or is Herr Hitler right in believing that the masses are stupid? When I was in the University of Iowa, editing the college paper, I used to write editorials from the general point of view that opinions held by the masses were wrong or stupid per se, that the common people behaved with the intelligence of sheep. But I have changed my point of

POLLS OF PUBLIC OPINION 29 view. I have in fact become something of an evangelist of democracy, because we have found, in polling the country on important issues of the day, political, economic, social, that the people do display an amazing amount of intelligence. Perhaps I should qualify by saying that if you were to go down the street and talk with the first dozen people you happened to meet about the Supreme Court, you would find, as you talked to them individually, that few of them were particularly well informed about it. You might find one or two, perhaps, but not many. A democracy such as ours doesn't depend upon the intelligence of every individual, but upon the collective intelligence of the masses, the collective judgment of the group. As an illustration, I like to use this particular example. A professor put on a board a line five and half feet long and he asked the thirty members of his class to guess the length of that line. Now, not one of the thirty guessed the exact length. Some were away off on one side, some were away off on the other, but the average of all of those judgments was exactly right. Now, something like that seems to happen in a democracy. I don't mean to say that the people are always right. I certainly would not want to defend that viewpoint. But in a surprisingly large number of cases, I believe that the public is right in its collective judgment. If you were to pick what you regard as the hundred most intelligent people here at the University of Pennsylvania, or in the country, and ask those people to vote on the same issues the public has voted on, I should say that the chances are ninety-nine in one hundred that they would agree with the public nine times out of ten. I'd like to read a couple of paragraphs from a column of Heywood Broun. You may have seen it a couple of nights ago. I'll read just the first couple of paragraphs: Several readers seem to be worried about the state of the Nation, and in particular they are disturbed by the fact that

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without the formality of a constitutional amendment, a new and superior branch has been added to our national Legislature. In the judgment of these readers, the creation of this small but august body reduces 1939 Congressmen to the estate of being no more than rubber stamps, and these readers contend that a bloodless revolution has occurred through the new practice of conducting government not on the basis of popular elections, but on the polling of cross-sections by Dr. Gallup and his little band of trained experts. I fear that there is merit in this contention. Many Washington correspondents report that the Dies Committee will be continued with practically no debate at all. They quote members of the House as saying We don't like a lot of things about the Dies Committee, but what can we do? Seventy-four per cent of Americans are for it, according to the Gallup tally. T h a t is too big a crowd to buck." T h a t is the trouble with government by cross-section. . . .3 T h e r e is some merit in that criticism, and if it were true that it did, in effect, impose a cloture on debate, if people merely read the results of our polls and acted accordingly, it might be a bad thing for the country. W e have no thought whatsoever, or no desire, to have any of our results influence legislation. As I said earlier, we regard ourselves merely as a fact-finding organization and, as I told you, I think we like to look upon ourselves as a U n i t e d Press, or Associated Press, f u n c t i o n i n g in this new realm of journalism—what people think. T h e newspapers cover fully and completely and impartially the realm of events, what the world does, what people do, and we are trying to cover in the same way what people think. W e don't care any more what happens or what is done about the results that we produce than the Associated Press cares about what is done with the stories, or as a result 3 H e y w o o d B r o u n , the Philadelphia

Record,

January 10, 1939.

POLLS OF PUBLIC OPINION 31 of the publication of news which it produces. But I do think that we serve to defeat various pressure groups. I think it is better for Congress to have an impartial organization, attempting to find the facts, and attempting to do it honestly, than to have, let us say, the American League for Peace and Democracy waiting upon congressmen, the American Legion and other groups telling these same people that the public is all in favor of the other side, that they will be defeated in the next election unless they vote this way or that way. David Lawrence, and a good many other keen students of government, know the importance of pressure groups, and I think that there is a possibility that our work may help to nullify the work of lobbyists and pressure groups. I am frequently asked how fast opinion changes. Typically, opinion changes rather slowly. In the case of Prohibition, we find that sentiment changes at the rate of about 1 % per year—that is, sentiment for returning to Prohibition increases 1 % a year. I don't mean to predict that in sixteen years we shall have Prohibition again, but something will have to be done between now and then to change the present gradual trend, or we'll have Prohibition again. On the other hand, opinion may change very fast. Before Hitler seized Austria, opinion in this country toward him and Germany was fairly neutral. After the seizure of Austria, there was a violent change in opinion. A public which up to that time had been fairly neutral at once became hostile and remains so today. Now I see I have only a few minutes left, and what I should like to do is very briefly sketch some of the results that we have found in our polls in the last couple of years, or particularly since the election. The problem of the G.O.P. is one of attracting the vote of the young people. T h e older you are, the more likely you are to be a Republican. Now, if I were to poll this group here I suspect

32 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES that a majority of you would be Republicans. That is because you belong to the group of "haves" although some of you may not think so. But if you were to poll young people the country over, the people between twenty-one and thirty-one, you would find that they are predominantly Democratic. The battle ground of the next election will be in the middle third of the population—the middle third along income lines. I have occasion to talk to many Republican leaders and Democratic leaders, and I find that the typical Republican leader believes that the middle class begins at about $5,000. I have never found one of them who really knew the facts, and the facts are that the middle third of the voting population is that group which has a total weekly family income of $20 to $40. That is the middle third of the voting population, and the Republicans, to win the election in 1940, must develop a program and a leader who will appeal to that particular group, and I think you will admit that these people are less interested, in many instances, in constitutional liberties and changing our basic form of government than they are in that old everyday question: "When do we eat?" You find, in the Republican Party, a trend toward the liberal viewpoint. The Republican leaders that at present are the most popular are Thomas Dewey, Vandenberg, and Taft. We find, to the contrary, in the Democratic Party a pull toward the conservative side. The dominant pull of public opinion is at the moment toward the middle, so it is very likely that we may have as our next President a middle-of-the-roader. The conservatives are most popular, aside from President Roosevelt, in the Democratic Party today. Now I haven't time to talk to you about our findings in questions of armaments and spending, etc. We find the majority of people against the third term, we find Franklin Roosevelt going up in popularity at the moment. We

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33

find that in periods of quiet, Roosevelt's popularity tends to rise; when he gets into a fight, it tends to go down. As a matter of fact, it invariably goes up when he goes fishing. And I say that in no disparaging sense. It would be interesting, and I suspect some student of political science could write a very excellent book pointing out these swings in opinion. You find that the public, like the stock market, goes too far in one direction, and attempts to correct itself. This happens to be one of the periods of quiescence when the public doesn't want things done. Of course, during the Hoover régime, they were against Hoover because he did nothing, and now a great many people are against Mr. Roosevelt because they think he is trying to do too much. I should like to close this talk by repeating a statement made by Theodore Roosevelt. He said: "Day in and day out, the plain people of the United States would make fewer mistakes in governing themselves than any smaller class or body of men would make in trying to govern them."

OBJECTIVES OF ORGANIZED LABOR by Robert J. W a t t 1

I

T is difficult for a man in the labor movement to come before several hundred students in a school of finance and describe some of the objectives of organized labor. T o a large degree we talk a different vocabulary. Words which have years of live meaning to me may convey to you only a dull description of problems which you cannot feel. You read in books about efficiency and balance sheets. You are taught about management. We, on the other hand, have suffered from efficiency methods, fought the wage cuts decreed to provide dividends or to cut losses, and we have endured management methods of many sorts. You no doubt have been told of the shortcomings of labor unions and labor leaders by distinguished speakers who lecture you in high-minded fashion about your duties and responsibilities in this complex world. No names are called and of course no one is so rude as to get down to details, while we on the other hand have known the consequences of the incompetence or harshness of overambitiousness of management. Is it any wonder, then, that often labor and management face each other across the table, but are miles apart in their thinking and their conclusions? But before discussing labor problems, I want to talk i Former Secretary of the Massachusetts State Federation of Labor; American delegate to the International Labor Organization at Geneva. A Howard Crawley Memorial Lecture delivered before the W h a r t o n School of Finance and Commerce of the University of Pennsylvania, March 3, 1939. 35

36 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES about some of the human problems which all of us—in labor or management or finance—face today. A few weeks ago I was in Geneva attending the meeting of the governing body of the International Labor Organization. T h e I.L.O., as you know, was established as the economic wing of the League of Nations. Its purpose is to reduce the intense rivalries which led to war in 1914 because of the struggle between the "haves" and the "havenots." Its method was clearly set forth: to improve the working conditions in all countries by enabling individual countries to raise standards without exposing themselves to the unfair competition of exploited labor in other nations. Today, even though the I.L.O. is active and vigorous, the rise of intense nationalism has reintroduced exploitation of the masses in several of the world's big industrial nations. We have not accomplished the ideal which created the I.L.O. Like the League of Nations, the purpose of the I.L.O. is beyond question, but some of the midwives who tended the infant did not have clean hands! The I.L.O., like the League, was contaminated by the vices of Versailles and today is still suffering from the birthright of the hate and the jealousy of the many which tarnished the zeal and idealism of the few. That is the background from which I try to speak to you today. I cannot avoid a heaviness of spirit because I have so recently been talking to the labor leaders of the democratic nations of Europe, who have learned at first hand the reality of our present struggle for individual liberty, economic opportunity, and the sanctity of the spirit of man. Why is it that the scientific and economic progress of mankind has been followed by the curse of totalitarianism which threatens to put the peoples of the world into perhaps the worst slavery that man has ever known? Of course I cannot pretend to know the answer to such

OBJECTIVES OF ORGANIZED L A B O R 37 a question. But when I was asked to talk about the objectives of labor in this country, I could not drive out of my thoughts a picture of the Nazi menace. But I am not here to fill you with forebodings. If I thought we were to slump into the strait-jacket of dictatorship, I would prefer not to talk about it. It would be kinder to let us enjoy the blessings of liberty and decency while we could. I talk about the Nazi and Fascist menace for the good reason that I believe we can avoid it and even show to the world the way of escape. I refuse to believe that totalitarianism is the cure for our ills or that it will long endure in any nation. Machiavelli put on paper the mechanics of tyranny, villainy, brutality, and the vicious materialism of utter dictatorship. But Machiavelli's formula failed and failed in each succeeding century to provide anything but a temporary blight upon the progress of man. No dictator has found the formula that assures success, because none can be truly self-sufficient. Mussolini, after nearly twenty years of domination, cannot get along without a big bodyguard. His boasted courage is guarded by secret police, armored cars, and drastic imprisonment of any possible suspects. Likewise Hitler drives through the nation he terrorizes, but he does not drive alone. T h e essence of dictatorship is fear, not merely fear in the hearts of the people who are ruled, but fear in the heart of the dictator, fear of those around him, fear of the day when some equally unscrupulous demagogue may emerge to outbid him, fear of the crowds he summons to cheer him. Even the apparent efficiency of the totalitarian state cannot completely remove the prospect of defeat. In speaking of the Fascist menace I want to make it clear that I object equally to the Communist method. Fascism and Communism have much in common. Personally I see

38 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES little danger of Communism ever becoming popular here unless democracy should completely break down. Communism, unlike Fascism, does not even seem to be sugar-coated, and there seems little danger that any American millionaires would ever subsidize a Communist movement. How are we to preserve our Democracy? Should we as a free people imitate the methods of dictatorship to meet our problems? Should we as a free people ignore the social and economic weaknesses which might destroy the fabric of our community, or should we face reality and patiently plan and accomplish a healthy society? If our people once recognize the danger that does exist in either of the first two alternatives, I am confident that we in intelligent self-interest can and will find the way to an unselfish state of social, economic, and political stability. That seems to me to be the challenge which faces America, and to be the biggest problem which faces the multitudes of American working people today. T h e solution of that problem seems to me the greatest objective of organized labor today. Yes, however remote from the subject my talk may thus far have seemed, I say with deep conviction that labor's number one problem is that of finding the formula for the social, economic, and political problems created by the sudden industrialization of the world in which we live. Somehow we must find the solution if man is to enjoy the fruits of modern civilization. Brute force may dominate events from day to day, but brute force is only a solution for the life of the jungle. Man must learn to live with his neighbors in peace, in friendliness, and in mutual progress. Let me now talk more directly on the immediate problems or objectives of labor. The first objective of organized labor is the organization of those workers still outside the ranks of the labor movement. T o meet the community problems of which I have

OBJECTIVES OF ORGANIZED LABOR 39 been talking we must recruit the millions of workers still outside our ranks. We must conduct an educational or missionary campaign to show all workers—whether wearing white collars or overalls—the necessity of their taking part in solving our economic problems. In Great Britain and Sweden, where I spent considerable time last year as a member of President Roosevelt's Commission, many employers today recognize that complete organization of workers is a tremendous force for business and governmental stability. If all workers were in effective, strong unions, the price-cutting and chiseling tactics of sweatshop competition could be easily eliminated without requiring governmental setting of standards. In other words, by eliminating the exploitation of labor, unions could make an enormous contribution to capital by strengthening and stabilizing price structures. The recent recession showed that strong unions could maintain wage values and prevent demoralization of property values in certain basic industries, whereas lack of effective organization in textiles opened the door to wage and price slashes. More and more, unions which once thought themselves sufficiently strong to protect the rights of members have come to realize that they can maintain these rights only by assuring wage standards in other industries high enough to provide purchasing power. Frankly, the longer I am in the labor movement, the more I believe that the closed shop is a necessary institution in all industries. In the first place, whatever gains are earned by union labor are shared by non-union workers. I think it is only fair that those who share the benefits should pay their share of the cost and effort and risk. Secondly, a union can maintain adequate discipline only if it operates in a closed shop. And there is another reason for a closed shop. A union should be representative of all groups in a plant, conservative as well as liberal. Those fastidious conservatives who criticize unions should be within

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CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES the union where their voices and votes can help to mould the union's policies! T h a t brings me to another point, that of union leadership. Any man with average intelligence who has been in the labor movement for any length of time knows that at some times in some places and in some unions there has been leadership of a mediocre sort. I say this in no sense of apology. In a representative democracy, leadership reflects the spirit of the voters. If people of substantial quality fail to participate, the union must find its leadership elsewhere. If the employer bulldozes workers to prevent their joining, it is a safe prediction that only the tough, salty people will have the courage or recklessness to join. Their tactics are the tactics needed to meet the employer's bulldozing. A great many of our conservative unions today grew out of unions which fought it out on the picket lines against scabs, strikebreakers, stool pigeons, trouble makers, and even the police or militia enlisted by the employers. They are law-abiding, respectable groups today, but they had to fight their way to respectability. Unions, as I said, have to recruit their members from the workers in the factory or store. If the workers are serious minded, the chances are that their leaders will be of that sort. If the boss hires only Communists, I should be surprised if the local union produced a conservative group of officers! T h e type of leadership depends on another factor. It depends on the immediate function of the union. By and large, American unions have had to spend most of their time organizing and usually doing their organizing against heavy odds. Hence the leadership of many unions has been and still is in the hands of the organizer type. T h e organizer is usually a salesman, maybe a rabble rouser in the opinion of many employers, and often he is a strike leader. T h a t is why relatively few of our new unions are headed by skilled administrators. As long as the union must fight

OBJECTIVES OF ORGANIZED LABOR 41 to live, it has to have a fighting leader. Once the union has won its fight, its function becomes that of servicing its membership and cooperating with employers, and only then does it begin to need an administrative type of leadership. The objective of any union is to serve its membership. Organizing is but one of the steps toward that end. Once accomplished, a union can survive only by producing the leadership which can serve the membership well enough to hold their respect and confidence. T h e fact that the older trade union movement of Great Britain and Sweden have done so is evidence that the American labor movement, as a whole, can and will solve this problem now that a substantial measure of solidarity has been won. Each of these objectives which I have mentioned is, however, only one of the many steps forward which labor must take in order to fulfill its first purpose—the improvement of the economic conditions of its membership. The organization of the unorganized, the establishment of the closed shop, a skilled leadership in negotiation and administration—all of these steps are means to an end. You may have noticed that I have not mentioned collective bargaining as an objective. This is because the practice of collective bargaining as a right was won in 1935 when President Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act. T o be sure labor has always regarded it as a right, but we usually had to beat an employer once in a strike before he would recognize that right, and of course many of your wealthy Pennsylvania corporations were rich and ruthless enough to break strikes and smash unions whenever their workers became so rash as to petition for better conditions. However, the New Deal gave labor the specific legal sanctions through which alone labor could be confident of the mere right of meeting the employer and presenting the petition of his workers. I dare say that this is one law which

42 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES has aroused more animosity in some circles against President Roosevelt than any other New Deal statute, and yet it merely promises to workers the right to enlist government aid to enforce the right of free petition in a representative democracy, a right which was established in the Bill of Rights a century and a half ago. T o us it is machinery by which we can reach another step in our necessary progress. Under present conditions it is essential that management and labor be on a status of equal partnership. I call attention to the fact that I say equal partnership between management and labor. I do not say a partnership between capital and labor, because that blissful ideal means little today. Capital today rests in the hands of many, so many, in fact, that there is no real control or responsibility among the shareholders. The voice of capital today is the voice of management whether it be the bankers, insurance company presidents, or brokers, or a mixture of all of them. The people whose money forms the capital of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, for instance, have a theoretical voice in the selection of the officers, but in practice, surprisingly enough, employees of management sign their proxies for them on behalf of a self-perpetuating management. J . P. Morgan's power is not merely in his own pocket-book but in the accounts which he manages on behalf of other people. So, too, as to partnership. A partnership may be like the rabbit stew described in the joke book—one horse and one rabbit! In the past those who talked about partnership between labor and capital or management were careful to retain unto themselves the decision as to what the partnership consisted of. Too often it was interpreted to mean that management set the policies, established the wage rates, hired or fired at will, and kept the profits—whereas labor shared in the partnership by contributing services under conditions imposed by the employer. A telephone company worker who kids himself that he

OBJECTIVES OF ORGANIZED LABOR 43 is a partner in that company when he buys a single share of its stock probably would have a rude awakening if he went to the stockholders' meeting and told his partners that they should go slow in putting more capital in dial exchanges. Well, labor wants a partnership which is really equal— which has a voice in deciding the basic policies of the company—as to sales programs, price systems, equipment investments, and so forth. Perhaps such an idea is shocking to you. Perhaps you will think I am a socialist or a communist or something. I really am not any one of these. I am just one who believes that a worker invests in the company by which he is employed something more vital and essential than a few dollars in capital. He is investing, if all goes well, a lifetime of service. He can't sell out and switch his investment elsewhere, under ordinary circumstances, without writing off a heavy depreciation charge. Why shouldn't the worker have a right to insist that the management exercise real prudence in its handling of his investment? I know of many textile mills in New England where workers spent twenty or thirty or forty years under managements so stupid or shortsighted that they had to liquidate. Their sales program had been given to a New York agent, their mills given to a son-in-law or cousin to operate whenever he wasn't in Palm Beach or Europe, their machinery had become obsolete, their buildings had grown old, but were still counted as real capital! And short-sighted owners took out of the very profits of the northern mills the capital for establishing new competitive machinery in the cheap labor sections of the south! After all, it was the workers who paid the costs of management! But the basic objective of labor through a real partnership is the establishment of a wage system which will give to the workers the purchasing power needed to enable them to be customers of industry; customers who can and will

44 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES buy enough to keep the mills and stores busy; customers who will sustain present employment and create more and more jobs at decent hours and wages; customers who will enable both management and labor to enjoy the fruits of their partnership. I say that workers must have high wages and a short work week in order to enable the business man to enjoy profits. High wages are necessary to maintain property values. How many of you have stopped long enough to realize that the chief characteristics of a depression are low wages —so low that prices of goods collapse, employment declines, and a general state of business paralysis exists? Under the present economic system, business must maintain a high purchasing power in its domestic market or else give way to recurring depressions which will force the community in self-defense to reorganize our economic system. I submit that if any legitimate criticism can be aimed at the New Deal reforms it can be legitimately raised only on the charge that the New Deal did not go far enough or fast enough in the national reorganization which it had to assume in 1933 when the business community had sunk into a very real state of receivership. However, I am too conservative to make that criticism. I have an idea that the New Deal was also conservative enough to look to a real partnership between management and labor as the most constructive medicine it could offer. The famous Section 7A of the N R A could have gone far to correct the abuses which had so nearly destroyed the capitalistic system. Unfortunately labor had been so weakened during the previous decade that it was poorly prepared to overcome the sabotage so promptly undertaken by big business. But times have changed. We live in a complex system of specialized services which must all function smoothly if our system is to endure. A powerful progressive labor movement is the only al-

OBJECTIVES OF ORGANIZED LABOR 45 ternative to government control which this nation can choose if it is to continue as a nation of freedom, equality, and justice. Government control is a poor substitute because it essentially must be relatively inflexible and because the concentration of economic and social responsibility into a political framework pyramids so high that even the most capable executive must shudder at the consequences of his every move. The labor movement, if given the opportunity, can provide the same representative democracy in economic affairs which the government now represents in political affairs. It can and should reflect the needs and interests of economic freemen, as should the President and Congress reflect the civic aspirations of our democracy. Just as the Courts and the Congress exercise a check upon the Chief Executive, so would management balance the demands of labor. You can raise all the objections you wish as to the training, personal shortcomings, individual domination or anything of the sort on the part of labor leaders. In a representative democracy, the will of the people usually finds eventual translation into fact. In a labor union, the membership can reflect their choice. If there aren't enough students of finance in the labor movement, it is not our fault— it is yours. The white-collar group need trade unionism just as much as the trade union needs them. Some day the clerks and stenographers and accountants may realize that their hope for decent hours and wages and personal integrity lies in the labor movement, rather than in the hope of marrying the boss or his daughter! The objective of the labor movement is just to service its membership on wages, hours, and working-conditions. No labor leader can or should ever forget that his first duty is that of representative of his people. But the labor movement is so close to the people that it can serve them in other fields.

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CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES The American Federation of Labor has maintained a non-partisan attitude in politics, judging individual candidates on the basis of their individual records on labor measures. If the policy of non-partisanship is ever abandoned, I venture to predict that the change will be made only because of the failure of the present major parties to provide suitable candidates for labor to sponsor. The President of the United States speaking as head of the Democratic Party has warned his party that it cannot prosper if the voters are offered only a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. I must confess that labor too often has had to choose between two candidates on the basis of which is the lesser evil. Labor is going to demand that government function for the general welfare. We are weary of log-rolling, privilege, sectionalism, and patronage. Likewise we are tired of bureaucracy. It is time that the economic spokesmen for the people enlisted in a campaign to reorganize the spirit and form of governmental services. Labor must keep as its objective the humanizing of government. I see much of government departments in Washington. I am impressed by the devotion and competence of the great majority of high and low officials. The major defect I have seen is in the major domos in between. My judgment is that the New Deal has been hindered with a bureaucracy inherited from previous administrations or enlisted during N R A days which has done more to discredit the New Deal than all the party hacks whom our senior statesmen saddled upon the administration. I mention this because it is one of the problems of labor. We put laws on the statute books for the general welfare, and a year or two later we find some ex-Chamber of Commerce handshaker drawing a salary to administer a law which he probably opposed in the first place and disapproves of even while he gets paid to administer it. As to wages and hours, we asked for a law to eliminate

OBJECTIVES OF ORGANIZED LABOR 47 the worst sweatshop conditions in interstate commerce. Just as Great Britain has found it necessary to establish minimum wages in poorly organized trades, so we here had to ask that a floor be set below which wages could not fall, and a ceiling beyond which hours of work should not rise. This law can go far to strengthen our defenses against the exploitation of the poor and the destruction of human and property values. We want it made even stronger, and we want the states to enact supplementary state wage and hour acts. I hope I need not say that the recommendations of the La Follette Committee for restraint upon interstate thugs and strike breakers is essential to the preservation of our civil and economic liberties. And it is time that the misuse of injunctions or the un-American yellow dog contracts should be legislated out of existence wherever they remain. One of the truly important objectives of our generation is the development of a real social security program. Labor has great respect for the work commenced under John Winant and continued under Arthur Altmeyer. The Social Security Board has gone far toward realizing the highest ideals of governmental service. It has undertaken to make the law fit the needs of the people whom it was designed to protect. I urge you all to read and study the "Proposed Changes in the Social Security Act" submitted by the Social Security Board to the President and recommended by him to the Congress. These changes are aimed to equalize in substantial measure the struggle of the wage earner for security for himself and his family—not as charity or paternalism but as an earned right. I note with approval that Chairman Altmeyer has commended to the Congress the public works program recommended by the Senate Committee. This plan would establish a public works program for all those unemployed not entitled to unemployment insurance or who have exhausted

48 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES their benefit rights. It would take W P A out of politics by making it a right of all who are unfortunate enough to be unable to find a decent job in private industry. The stability which this plan would offer should go far toward creating a business activity which would soon minimize the need for the works program. In closing I say on behalf of labor that our objectives are to enable the people of the nation to earn a security and happiness which the machinery of modern science has made possible for any nation which has the courage and intelligence to utilize them in the service of mankind. We can accomplish these objectives and establish and maintain a circulation of goods and services by high wages and reasonable prices if we can enjoy a real partnership with management. We can accomplish these objectives if we can infuse into the processes of government the ideals of public service which spring from the heart and intellect of the present leader of our representative democracy. We can accomplish these objectives if we will protect ourselves against the oppression of the exploiters or the deceit of the false leader. We can accomplish these objectives if we prod both parties into giving us candidates and leaders who will prove true to their trust, keen to our needs, alert in our interest, and honest to the representative constitutional democracy which is our birthright and our refuge.

CAN WAR BE AVERTED? by Clarence K. Streit 1

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many of us wish to think that we are spectators in the race that is going on in the world today between dictatorship and democracy. Perhaps none of you are more naturally inclined toward the spectator's role in everything than I am. For I was born in Missouri; you can't start with a greater desire to be shown than that or, we think, with a more scientific attitude. And then I moved as a youth still further from Europe, to the western side of the Continental Divide in Montana, and I was surveying in Alaska and was twenty-one before I ever went east of the Mississippi River. Together with all this I got early into the work of newspaper reporter and have been accustomed most of my life to watching all kinds of events from the front seat while doing my best to obey the first rule of reporting—that of keeping detached from and unentangled in everything. But a man can hardly keep finding and reporting facts first-hand for twenty years without forming some judgments on them, desiring to do his bit to turn these facts from destructive to constructive ends. Even a Missourian can be shown some things, and I want to devote myself now to reporting what the facts have finally shown me. They have shown me that we Americans are not spectators in that race GREAT

i Chairman of the National Organizing Committee of the Inter-democracy Federal Unionists. T h e Wharton School is indebted to the Institute of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, for permission to reproduce this address which is substantially the same as Mr. Streit's Howard Crawley Memorial Lecture which was delivered at the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, University of Pennsylvania, May 18, 1939.

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CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES between dictatorship and democracy; we are in it ourselves with more stake than any others—after all, the more one has, the more one has to lose, whether it be freedom, riches, great prospects, or all combined. W e are in the struggle, and if we are to win, it is high time that we cease leaving our business to others, wasting our energies criticizing them, telling them how to do what no one can do so well as we can do ourselves, risking our heritage by watching others trying to learn the work we have specialized in for three hundred years. It is high time we Americans returned to our great tradition of constructive pioneering. If we are to win in this race we must take the lead ourselves and lead the world the American way. I am as much concerned as anyone here with keeping our people out of war and from becoming entangled in the policies of foreign governments over which we have no control. But I have never been shown anybody who kept out the smallpox by saying, "I'm not going to get the smallpox because I don't want to get it, and my yard is bigger than my neighbor's." I've never been shown anybody who kept out the smallpox by saying, "I'm going to be neutral; I'm not going to have anything to do with this smallpox epidemic; it's too dangerous to take sides even with the doctor or the victims." I've never been shown anybody who kept out the smallpox by carrying a rabbit's foot and mumbling when he saw a victim, European, European, Fly away to war. I'm a better democrat, Better than you are. I have been shown people who kept out being vaccinated, by facing beforehand side their control and bringing it under stead of waiting for the disease's hidden them.

the smallpox by the dangers outtheir control inweb to entangle

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We Americans have no way of controlling what the British or the French government will do tomorrow, to say nothing of Hitler and Mussolini. But when, for only one example, Hitler takes over Czechoslovakia, and forty divisions in military power pass from the democratic to the dictatorial side, we can condemn Hitler and wash our hands of Chamberlain all we please, but we are entangled in the result just the same. If we aren't, if the Atlantic ocean is protection enough, then why did Congress promptly break another record in armament appropriations, and do it with more popular approval than before? We can blame the Europeans all we please, but that does not change the fact that we do have some responsibility for the condition they and we are in today, that they, on their side, are entangled by what we do or fail to do, though they have no more control over the policies we adopt than we have over theirs. I should like to remind you of the conditions I found when I was assigned to Geneva in 1929. There was no shadow of war then either in Europe or Asia. Franco-German relations were never more friendly this century than then. It was at the Assembly of the League of Nations that September that Briand held his famous luncheon at which —as he smilingly told us reporters when he came downstairs —he laid the cornerstone for his plan for a United States of Europe. No European foreign minister supported him more in that plan than Stresemann. The two of them were fast liquidating the injustices of the Versailles Treaty. That same assembly saw Japan moving toward a plan for the reconstruction of China in cooperation with the western powers through the League. Not only debts were being paid, but reparations too, and the world was buying American goods as never before. A week or so after that happy assembly dispersed there came the crash in Wall Street. We can hardly blame that on the Europeans or the Japanese, their hatreds, "love of war,"

52 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES and all that. For ten years we had been following a policy of strict isolationism. We had decided that we could keep out that way from the dangers we saw in the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations. We were big enough to go our own way, we had oceans around us, we were a world apart, not a part of the world. More than that: We were not only a political but an economic law unto ourselves. We were no longer subject even to old economic laws, we had entered a New Economic Era all our own. In those days our leaders told us, " T h e future destiny of America is in our hands, and is not dependent upon other nations." We could hardly have done more than we did to make the bubble that burst in 1929 a 100 per cent American bubble. But all the world was entangled in the results. After Wall Street crashed, we began reducing our purchases from abroad, we put up the tariff to protect us further, we insisted more than ever that the Europeans pay us gold instead of goods, and factories began to close abroad, and unemployment began to rise, of course, particularly in Germany. And as unemployment rose there, something else began to rise with it. Through the nineteen-twenties Hitler had been talking his anti-semitic nonsense, he had been denouncing the Versailles Treaty, and he hadn't got to first base even when the conditions of Versailles were at their worst. What even the Ruhr occupation failed to do for him our Wall Street crash succeeded in doing. In the Reichstag of September 1929, Hitler had less than a score of deputies. In the first Reichstag elected after our bubble burst he had more than one hundred deputies. Hitler rose to power with the hard times and unemployment that burst on the world from America. The German people were so entangled by what we did that they have already lost their good name to racial fanatics and their political and economic liberties to a highly centralized to-

CAN WAR BE AVERTED? 53 talitarian dictatorship that does business by barter abroad and goose-stepping at home. And as the Germans got entangled in all that, we have been getting entangled in it too. Not only on the war side. The ocean and all our armaments have not proved big enough to keep out of our country that most un-American of all the Nazi doctrines—the doctrine that denies that men are born equal and that condemns and discriminates against men not because of anything they have done but because they happen to have been born Jewish. The ocean and all our armaments have not saved us from the Nazi trend away from a decentralized to a highly centralized government— Germany, too, was a federal republic before Hitler came. Long before we, too, had reached the point of doing business by barter with even the British and French, we had necessarily reached its prerequisite—that of putting the government into business, making millions of cotton growers, hog raisers, wheat farmers, business men, workmen both employed and unemployed, dependent directly on the government, the central government. Despite all our efforts and our wishes we have not been disentangling ourselves from all that. And even while, or if, we keep from being entangled in the war that all this is galloping toward, we shall be entangled the more rapidly in these other un-American things. Whether we are drawn into the war or whether we undergo the terrific "adjustments" of our economic life that trying to remain neutral in wartime, particularly on the basis of the existing law, will require, our lives and jobs and businesses will then be far more directly dependent on the central government, on one man's will, than they are today. Already the French, who are most directly exposed to the dictatorship danger, have had to give dictatorial powers to their government to protect their remaining liberties. Already the British, who are in between us and the French, have been forced to adopt conscription. And we still talk as

54 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES if the only danger that our freedom faces in America, no matter which side wins in Europe, is conquest by an invading army. We talk as if we did not know that we are in much greater danger from an invading idea, that no barriers have yet been found that will keep out an idea. We talk as if we did not know that the Italian and German peoples did not need war and a conquering foreign autocrat to lose their liberties. And yet we too can lose within our state what we made it for. If we lose our freedom to a home-grown fanatic while the British and French lose theirs to a foreign one, shall we be the better off? There was a time when the people in America were not entangled by what happened in Europe, nor the Europeans by what happened here. Those days ended in 1492. At least for those of us who are civilized. For there may be some tribes up some undiscovered branches of the Amazon that still have no communication with the outside world. The more backward, barbaric, a community is, the more it can claim to be self-sufficing, and the less it is entangled by what happens overseas. But the more advanced in machinery and means of communication a people is, the more civilized in every way it is, the less it can hope to be self-sufficing, the more it is bound to be entangled by all that happens in the civilized world, no matter how distant in miles. We who are civilized are all living now in the same world, and none of us are governing the world we live in. Our situation was well described by President Wilkins of Oberlin when he called it "ruination without representation." We are all living precariously now at the mercy of great powers outside our control. All the means we have so far developed to govern our common world have broken down. We have not been getting agreement in time to be of much good either from the old pre-war diplomatic machinery on which our people still rely exclusively, or from the more advanced League of Nations machinery. The agreements we did succeed in get-

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ting by these means in the period just after the war, and under the stimulus of its horrors, we have not been able to keep inviolate—whether it was the League Covenant, the Nine Power Pact, the Peace Pact—except by going to war against Japan, Italy, Germany. We didn't want to do that, the British didn't either, nor the French, nor others, and so our agreements have not been kept. W e have lapsed back into a condition where there is no law and no government, where there is only anarchy and the rule of force. We went to war to end that, to establish law and order and peace in the world, to make the world safe for democracy. I know it is the fashion now to sneer at that. Well, there were men who gave their lives for that. I do not sneer at what men died for. I know it is the fashion to say that it was all a bad mistake, and to put the blame on anyone except those of us who are alive and here—on foreigners and on the President who led us into the struggle to make the world safe for democracy and died still struggling to get government established in our world. I cannot take this comfortable position that our only mistake was to have let ourselves be drawn into the wartime side of that struggle, that we made no mistake then in letting ourselves be drawn out of the peacetime side of that struggle, that those who led us out and we who have lived through all these years since men ceased sacrificing and dying for this cause, that we alone have no responsibility for the situation we are in today. I prefer to accept my own responsibility. As I see it, we fought for two years to make the world safe for individual freedom, democracy, and then, at the first peacetime obstacle we encountered, we quit. We found fault with President Wilson's League, but we didn't try to find how to correct those faults, we offered no alternative. We quit, the record shows, and devoted ourselves to making money and proving that no matter what happened to the rest of mankind we were safe. When that isolationist bubble burst, we tried more of the

56 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES same, only worse—we tried neutralism. And where ten years of isolationism rewarded us with the hardest times we've known, five years of neutralism have left us endangered not only by depression but by war. If any theory has ever had a fair test, it is this isolationist neutralist theory that we are not a part of the world but a world apart, that we can get peace and prosperity and freedom in our world, not by organizing law and order and government in it but by setting the example of insisting that, because we are stronger than the others, we must remain above the law, a law unto ourselves alone. It seems to me that we have been punished enough by this delusion, that it is time for us to go back to the old principles on which we have always flourished. It was not to isolationism, neutralism, better-than-thouism, that we were dedicated at Gettysburg, but "to the great task remaining before us." If, for once in our history, our dead died in vain, who that time abandoned in the hour of victory the cause for which they died? There were Americans who fought for seven years to make one coast of the Atlantic safe for democracy. What would they think of a generation who quit because they could not make the whole world safe for it in two? Does any American here believe that we shall fail to go forward to that goal if "from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth"? Whether we like it or not, that struggle is again upon us, and the only choice we really have is between losing or winning it. For when there is a condition of anarchy in a community, whether it be composed of individuals or nations, one of two things is bound to happen. Either some strong

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man unites the others under h i m by force, dictates his law to them; or the law-abiding people unite of their o w n free will in establishing self-government, democracy. A n d usually they haven't sense enough to do it until the dangers of anarchy become very near and great. Isn't that just what is happening in the world today? O n the one side we see Japan uniting great areas of C h i n a under its law by war, Mussolini uniting the Italians and the Ethiopians and Albanians under his law by force, Hitler uniting the Germans and Austrians and Czechs and Slovaks under h i m by force. B u t while all this has been going on, the other movement has been going on, too. T h e old democracies have been edging closer and closer together, realizing better with each disaster that, as old B e n j a m i n Franklin put it, either they must hang together or hang separately. T h e race is already on between the dictatorial and the democratic methods of uniting people, and the only question is: W h i c h method is first going to unite enough power to determine which way the world shall go in our t i m e — and for who knows how long to come? Shall the future belong to the principle that you see flaunted through G e r m a n y — d u bist nichts, dein volk ist alles, you are nothing, your nation is everything? Shall we go backward with the misery-making autocratic principle that governed the world for ages and drove m e n from Europe to our shores? O r shall we continue forward with the richest political principle that men have ever discovered, the principle that the state, the nation, is merely a means, and that you, the individual, are the important thing, that we men make the state to secure our lives and liberties, and that " w h e n any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government"? Shall the future continue to belong to this principle which we were the first solemnly to declare to be the basis of government, and toward which the world had been moving steadily, increas-

58 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES ingly, since 1776 until we ourselves refused in 1920 to carry it forward into the world? There can be no question that concerns us Americans more directly and deeply than this one, for it goes to our very roots. It involves far more than our heritage in land. It involves the basic principles that brought us that heritage, brought us everything in the great heritage handed down to us by men of courage and vision who put the freedom of man above the freedom of the state—the great heritage that every American generation before ours has increased and that now is endangered as perhaps never before. We, whose fathers organized government of, by, and for the people along the Atlantic seaboard, then beyond the Appalachians, then beyond the Mississippi, and then beyond the Rockies—we have neglected now so long the task of organizing such government beyond the Atlantic that it is only too probable now that we can no longer save our principles without another general war. But we still have a fighting chance to do it in time to prevent that war—and a fighting chance to make our own American Union was all they had who took that chance and made it in 1787. We have still a fighting chance, but we have no time to lose. Experience at Geneva has convinced me that this task of organizing effective interstate self-government is so hard that we need to start in the easiest way that will get the results for which we make government. We need to start, then, by organizing a nucleus of a few peoples that are most experienced in organizing government by mutual consent, that are most congenial, and that have enough power to ensure that, if they do unite it, they can keep the peace from the start without war by sheer overwhelming preponderance of strength. These considerations lead us to these fifteen democracies, centering mainly around the North Atlantic: the American Union, Canada, Britain, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway,

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Sweden, Finland, Ireland, the U n i o n of South Africa, Australia, and N e w Zealand. N o two of these fifteen have had a single war between them for more than one hundred years. T h e y are not only good neighbors, they are the best the world has ever known. N e v e r have so many neighboring sovereign states covering so huge an area been at peace so long a time. Every one of these fifteen does most of its import-export business w i t h the other fourteen. Each has made its national government for the same purpose, individual freedom. Each now feels this freedom endangered, and each is arming to defend this c o m m o n heritage, separately. If we could find a more congenial group, we could not find one with half the p o w e r — a n d that is a rtiost important consideration. O u r fifteen, united, o w n half the earth, rule all its oceans, govern half mankind. T h e y have more than sixty per cent control of nearly every essential of peace or war. T h e y do two-thirds of the world's trade. T h e y have nearly all the gold and credit. T h e i r bank deposits total a hundred billion dollars. T h e i r existing armed strength is such that if they w o u l d only unite it effectively they w o u l d no longer need to go in debt increasing armaments. T h e y w o u l d be so strong that the powers now endangering each of them separately could no more dream of attacking any of their territory than M e x i c o can dream of invading the U n i t e d States. T h e y have the money and the trade and the resources and the armed power to make this world a safe and prosperous place for us each to live i n — i f they w o u l d only unite it effectively and do it in time, instead of sitting with eye fixed on Mein Kampf or ear glued to the radio waiting for Hitler to twit them with failure. H o w to unite their power? H o w better than by our own time-tested American Federal U n i o n way? W h y fiddle around longer with the diplomatic and League methods

60 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES when they have already failed and led us into these dangerous days? Why not lead the world to the only system of democratic interstate government that has ever worked, the Federal Union system which our fathers invented in 1787? It has worked with us for 150 years. It has worked in Canada among the English and the French, in South Africa among the Dutch and the English, in Switzerland among the Germans, French, and Italians. The time has come for us Americans to begin to think of our relations with the British and French and Swiss and other democrats on the same basis as the Virginians began to think of their relations with the Pennsylvanians and New Yorkers in 1787—when it took them much longer to go to New York than it takes us to go to Paris. What did the democrats of that day do? They fought seven years to make their world safe for democracy. T o keep the individual freedom they had won, the people of each of the thirteen democracies thought then —as we do now—that they must trust only in their own state: each state must have its own army, its own tariffs, its own money, its own independence in everything. And so they made the United States first into a "League of Friendship" (to quote the Articles of Confederation), organized much like the League at Geneva. That is, it was a government of governments, by governments, for governments. All the agreements they made in Congress then had to be applied against a government instead of an individual. As in Geneva this weakest possible lawbreaker was an armed and organized state, and the only way agreements could be enforced was by war. Each state had the same voting power, regardless of population, and state governments named the members of Congress as the President now names delegates to a conference with the British, French, and other governments. The object of this League, too, was to guarantee the freedom, not of the citizen, but of each state to do as it pleased in everything.

CAN WAR BE AVERTED? 61 The results? A situation amazingly similar to that of the fifteen democracies today, as anyone who turns to Fiske's Critical Period of American History will see. Depression, dubious money everywhere, unemployment, tariff, wars, threats of war between the states and between them and European nations, the League's Congress a laughing stock, each state government gaining more powers over the citizen while anarchy grew among the states. While this led some Americans to bemoan the war for democracy as a great mistake and say they had lost all they had fought for, it led others to go to Philadelphia in 1787 and apply again the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence. Finding the league form of government had become destructive of the ends for which democrats form government, they abolished it and instituted new government, invented the Federal Union government. In making the Union Constitution, they simply made the interstate government of the thirteen democracies a democracy itself. They made it, like the government of each of the democracies in it, a government of, by, and for the people. They arranged that every law Congress passed should henceforth be executed against individual citizens just as the state laws are. That allowed law to be enforced without the danger of war inherent in the league system. They provided that the people of the states should be represented on a population basis and elect their interstate government too. And, to make it plain why they made this new government they said at the outset, "We the people of the United States, in order to . . . secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves" —not to our states—make this Constitution. They arranged then for this new democracy to govern them in those fields where they thought they would gain in individual freedom and welfare by being governed by it instead of by the state government. They established under its power a common defense force, free trade market, money

62 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES and postal system, and they took for themselves citizenship in it as well as in their states. T h e y made it guarantee their individual rights to govern themselves in their own states in those fields they did not expressly transfer to the Union. Such is the Federal Union system that so successfully led the democracies then out of the same dangers that the democracies are in today. Such is the system that we Unionists now propose for the fifteen-—a Union defense force, free trade market, money, postal service and citizenship under a government of, by, and for all the people in it. Who can deny that we individuals would gain enormously by this Union? All our existing rights would be safeguarded more securely and cheaply and we would add to them new rights. T h e Union would guarantee to each of us three sets of rights: 1. Our individual rights as men (freedom of speech, press, etc.). 2. Our national rights to practise democracy at home as we please in every field except the few we transferred to the Union. 3. Our new Union rights to travel, trade, study, work, play, and live freely and equally before the law in all that half of the world that would be Union territory, to buy in its cheapest market what we need to buy, and sell in its dearest market what we have to sell, to enjoy a common money and postal and communications system, to extend through half the world all these rights we now enjoy among our forty-eight states, and to be protected in all three sets of rights by the overwhelmingly powerful Union defense force. T o follow the American example further, we would make this Union capable of universal expansion by the peaceful admission of new states to it. T h e aim would be, not to exclude outside states as does an alliance, but to keep admis-

CAN WAR BE AVERTED? 63 sion open to all other democracies, now or to come, that guarantee their citizens the individual rights for which the Union itself is made. We thus prevent war two ways. First, we make war hopeless by making the Union far too powerful to be attacked. Second, we make war useless by making it possible for outsiders to be admitted peacefully into the Union once they desire to enjoy its freedom for the individual. The German people, for example, would then have a tremendous incentive to overthrow Hitler, for only by attacking him, instead of us, and restoring their rights as men could they possibly gain the great advantages that membership in the Union would bring each of its citizens. Of course there are difficulties, but can we get what we want more easily and surely by any other way? What are the alternatives? If we will not govern our relations with the other democracies on a federal union basis we must govern them on a league, an alliance, or the present diplomatic basis. Will it be easier to get Americans to enter a league or an alliance, both of which entangle them in the policies of governments over which they have no control, or to enter a federal union based on their own Constitution which allows forty-eight democracies to live together without any being entangled by the others? And if it were easier to get us into a league or alliance, what proof of experience is there that we should then get what we make government to get— peace and plenty and individual freedom? If we could thus get these things better than by union, then why should we not abolish the American Union and replace it with a league or alliance of forty-eight states, each with its own army and air force, its own tariffs and standard of living, its own immigration quotas, its own money, its own domestic and foreign postage stamps? And if we can get what we want still better by the diplomatic method of governing inter-democracy relations, then why unite our forty-eight states even in a league or alliance?

64 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES Why not let each of our forty-eight states profit, too, from the benefits of isolationism and be a law strictly to itself? It is no doubt easier now to get the American people to continue to practise isolationism than to apply beyond our frontiers our own federal union system—just as it is easier to drift down a torrent than row to safety. But there is no doubt either that we are not getting peace and plenty and individual freedom by isolationism or neutralism. We never had before so huge a proportion of our citizens directly dependent on the government. We never before spent so much of our own—and of our children's money—for recovery, yet the last decade was the first in our history to register a decline in our standard of living, as H. Clay Williams, chairman of the Board of the Reynolds Tobacco Company, recently pointed out. As for peace, the later the poll the stronger the evidence that we feel in danger of another world war. No matter what we do inside our country, how can we hope for recovery while the war danger remains? How can we hope to remove that danger now except by this Union? And if the war comes how can we solve the problems it will leave except by this Union? Will it really be easier to make this Union then when millions of our finest are slain? It is true that the possibility of making this Union in time to prevent the outbreak of war seems remote. But the American Union was so remote in 1787 that when the delegates assembled for the Convention Washington told them, "It is too probable that no plan we propose will be adopted." T h e first Union was then made only because of the danger of immediate catastrophe, and because Washington had the courage to take the fighting chance he had to make it in time to prevent the catastrophe. We are under the same pressure now and we have the same fighting chance. The only question is whether we, too, will make the most of that chance now while we can. Certainly, this "more perfect Union" to which we Amer-

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icans are dedicated by our Constitution will never be made if we do not sometime start energetically making it, so why not start now? If we fail to make it in time to prevent war, we shall be that much further on toward making it during the war and thus lessening the catastrophe. If the war comes first, we shall be faced only the more urgently with the same issue: How shall we organize our relations with the democracies on whose side we shall be fighting sooner or later? Shall we put them again on the basis of an association or alliance where we have one vote and the British Commonwealth has seven? Or shall we insist on a federal union where the population counts? And what shall we fight for? T h e British Empire? T h e French Empire? Neutralism? Another League? Or for individual freedom through federal union? There can be no doubt what our choice will be when it comes to that showdown, so why not try to prevent that showdown by making known our choice right now? Thousands have already been doing that. This Union proposal began this spring with nothing to spread it except a book, Union Now, published by Harper in New York, March 2nd, and by Jonathan Cape in London, March 10th. T h e former is already in its tenth edition, the latter has been a best-seller since it came out. T h e French edition, Union ou Chaos?, published in mid-June, immediately "far exceeded our most optimistic hopes," to quote the publisher, le Librairie de Medicis in Paris. A Swedish edition will soon appear. Unionist organizations have already sprung up from Boston to Los Angeles in the United States where their provisional headquarters are at Union House, 445 West 23rd St., New York City. In England the Federal Union organization centers at 44 Gordon Square, London, and local Unionist committees have already spontaneously organized themselves in Canada, South Africa, and Australia. There is not space here to tell more of the rapidly rising

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evidence that the democracies are much riper for union than anyone dreamed. But doubters can get this evidence by reading from month to month in the new Unionist organ, Union Now Bulletin, how the world is responding to this idea. T h e greatest obstacle I have found to the realization of the Union is the bland assumption that the "others" won't agree to it, that "they" must first "suffer more" before they will have "enough commonsense to make the U n i o n " — a n d therefore that it is no use doing anything about it, or even saying that one is for it. Yet who are bringing on war if not those who take this view? And who are bringing on peace if not those who are coming out for the Union, joining together to get it, giving their time and money to spreading a commonsense idea and the commonsense response to it? W h o are helping to keep bad times? Those who assume that business will be against the Union? Or those who point out, as Fortune did in its April editorial, that this Union is "the greatest political and economic opportunity in history, by comparison with which the opening of the North American continent was a modest beginning," that it would bring "gigantic opportunities," "a rise in the standard of living of millions," "an inevitable revival in shipping and in railroads," the end of unemployment, a rich market for farmers, "a vista of industrial growth to which the only enlightening parallel is the growth of the United States itself"? All it takes to make this Union is for a majority of us to say we want it. T h a t means that on each of us now rests an equal responsibility for peace or war, good times or bad, dictatorship or freedom. Are we so much feebler than our fathers and our children that we cannot do what our fathers have already done and what we expect our children to do? How long are we going to continue belittling the success of 1789 and excusing the failure of 1939 by arguing that it was "easier to make the Union then than now"? How long are we going to keep on

CAN WAR BE AVERTED? 67 loading our children not only with this job but with the debts we are piling up through our unwillingness to do it ourselves, debts that grow more gigantic every day? We need, each of us, to remember that when we are measuring an idea, the idea is also measuring us. This idea has measured Americans before, and always found there were enough of them big enough for it. Shall it find us wanting now? Let me sum up briefly: We Americans who call ourselves Unionists mean to do our part to secure now to all men equally those rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to which we each were born. We believe that governments are instituted among men to secure these rights for them, and that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government. We believe that the form of government now governing the relations between ourselves and the people of the other democracies has become destructive of these ends. It is sacrificing needlessly, dangerously, and more and more, the rights of man to the rights of the states. It demands more and more in taxes and military duty. It no longer provides a stable money. It gives us much less freedom to trade and travel and work and play and live in the world than it gave a generation ago when it cost far less. All the time it is costing more and giving less to everyone, except those few into whose hands it centers governing power—a power that is daily becoming a greater power of life and death over each of us. It is increasingly exposing us common men and women to unemployment, dictatorship, war, to hunger, shame, and death. We believe that the time has now come to abolish the form of government now governing our relations with the peoples of these other democracies, and to join with them in instituting new government, as did the democracies of

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America in 1787-89 when they found a similar form of government was destroying their lives, liberties, and happiness. We believe that experience has shown that the Federal Union form of government then established in the Constitution of the United States of America, and since tested in Canada, Australia, the Union of South Africa, Switzerland, and elsewhere, is the form of interstate government among democracies that best secures the individual's life, liberty, and happiness. Therefore we are working for the institution of a Federal Union now among the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, the Union of South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and perhaps other democracies as founders. We are working for it as the first practical step toward a more perfect union of all men to be achieved by the peaceful admission of still more democracies to it as rapidly as this would promote individual freedom, peace, and plenty. By Union we mean an interstate government that shall be, like every democracy in it, a government of the people, by the people, for the people, and strictly limited to those fields of government we expressly delegate to it. We mean that the Union shall have a constitutional, representative government elected by the citizens of the democracies in it as its free and equal makers, empowered by them to raise from them individually the means of governing them individually wherever they empower it to govern them at all, guaranteeing each of them equally these three sets of individual rights: 1. Their rights as men to freedom of speech, press, conscience, association, jury trial—all the rights of man; 2. their rights as citizens of their nation to complete national self-government in all fields they do not expressly transfer from their national government to The Union; 3. their rights as citizens of The Union to vote, trade, travel,

CAN W A R BE AVERTED? 69 study, work, play, and live freely and equally before the law anywhere in the territory of The Union, to enjoy a common Union money, postal, and communications system, and to be protected in all their rights—individual, national, and Union—by a Union defense force. Such, briefly, is what we mean by Union. A n d we mean to make this Union now so that all those who have died for it shall not have died in vain, and so that millions more need not be slain to ensure that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish but grow freely round the earth. Let us keep in mind Washington's Farewell advice: These considerations speak a persuasive language to every reflecting and virtuous mind, and exhibit the continuance of the Union as a primary object of patriotic desire. Is there a doubt whether a common government can embrace so large a sphere? Let experience solve it. T o listen to mere speculation in such a case were criminal. We are authorized to hope that a proper organization of the respective subdivisions will afford a happy issue to the experiment. It is well worth a fair and full experiment. In the choice facing all men today the name of no man is so much at stake as the name American. Other peoples have proud traditions, but none has our tradition to continue on the frontiers of self-government and Union. Nor can this task be more urgent to any Americans than to those of my own generation. T h e last Americans to die that this tradition might live were not the cronies of our fathers. T h e y were not the playmates of our sons. T h e y were the boys who played Indian and Daniel Boone with us. They were the friends of those here who have now passed forty. T h e y have a claim on us they have on no one else. It is not our generation that is lost—not yet. W e have only now reached that mature age when the responsibility for all that America is rests most on us. W e followed when it was

70 CRAWLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES our turn to follow, now it is our turn to lead. We must write our own line now, or not at all, in the great record that Columbus opened with "Sail on!" We were lads in 1917 and we did then all that can be asked of youngsters. We are men today. Or are we? We must answer, now. This is an opportunity that you are facing, now, an opportunity that has never come before—and that, if lost, may be lost for ages, dark ages—an opportunity to do something really worth doing with this life of yours, to be one of the pioneers privileged to carry our American federal union system around the Atlantic ocean, and to do it now, in the face of difficulty and danger, in time to save millions of lives and all that America means. I leave this opportunity to you.

Schedule of the HOWARD CRAWLEY MEMORIAL

LECTURES

1938-39 November

29, 1938

R A Y M O N D LESLIE

12 o'clock WHERE ARE T H E RACIES GOING?

BUELL

President of the Foreign Policy Association January 13, 1939 GEORGE

11

o'clock P O L L S OF P U B L I C O P I N I O N AND W H A T T H E Y SHOW

GALLUP

Director, American Institute of Public Opinion January 27, 1939 HEINRICH

12 o'clock T H E E C O N O M I C A N D POL I T I C A L D I L E M M A OF C E N T R A L EUROPE

BRUENING

Member of the Faculty, Harvard Graduate School of Public Administration; former Chancelor of Germany March 3, 1939 ROBERT J.

12 o'clock T H E O B J E C T I V E S OF ORGANIZED L A B O R

WATT

American Delegate to the International Labor Organization at Geneva; former Secretary of the Massachusetts State Federation of Labor May 18, 1939 CLARENCE K .

DEMOC

12 o'clock C A N W A R BE A V E R T E D ?

STREIT

Washington Correspondent for the New York Times; formerly Foreign Correspondent in Geneva

7'