Rearmament v. Balderdash

When Franklin Roosevelt submits his 1939-40 budget to Congress next month, U. S. taxpayers will learn what he has in mind for Rearmament. Meantime, it be came apparent last week that Rearmament talk has been liberally larded with balder dash.

Franklin Roosevelt himself dished up something that looked like balderdash. At a White House press conference he conveyed the contradictory ideas that military spending must be on a pay-as-you-go basis and that this does not mean that the U. S. must Pay in the same year that it Spends. On top of this, he declared that pay-as-you-go Rearmament does not necessarily entail new taxes. Since the U. S. is still running whopping deficits, the implication was that Rearmament must replace some other form of spending, but the President went on to say that military spending is to be solely for military purposes, and not for pump-priming or re-employment.

So confusing was this melange that White House Secretary Stephen Early afterwards undertook to clarify it. In doing so, he volunteered the most revealing statement yet made on the subject. The President, said Mr. Early, has not decided whether to expand Rearmament at all. This amounted to saying that U. S. citizens lately have been gazing at nothing but a huge trial balloon. Not even this, however, was the most astonishing thing in the Administration's Rearmament fuss.

General Malin Craig, Chief of Staff of the U. S. Army, up to last week had not been consulted about the big new Rearmament plans. The law makes it his job to formulate military policy for his Commander-in-Chief. For weeks he has peeved in silence, loath to admit in public that he knows little more about the Administration's ideas for remaking the Army than ordinary newspaper readers. Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Naval Operations, is in much the same fix, with the difference that the Navy already had a big expansion program under way when three ex-officio strategists began to fiddle with the Administration's plans.

These militarists pro tem were none other than Janizaries Tommy Corcoran, Harry Hopkins and Aubrey Williams. Their nearest approach to a professional consultant was Assistant Secretary of War Louis Arthur Johnson, who likes to ignore generals. Nor was aggressive Mr. Johnson loath to leave out Secretary of War Harry Hines Woodring, who has been making cause with the snubbed general against his nominal assistant.

What put Corcoran, Hopkins & Co. into the armament business was a chance to hitch New Deal pump-priming to National Defense. In the democratic jitters after Munich they saw a glittering opportunity to butter up and stimulate heavy industry without surrendering to it on the issues of labor, utilities, regulation. The bright prospect to them was that businessmen who got Government millions in armament orders could hardly object to continued and even intensified regulation, especially if it were in the name of National Defense. Public health, housing, power, all could be tied to Rearmament-for-uplift, and Franklin Roosevelt would have a new touchstone for his general program.

Not at all averse to military spending, such professionals as Messrs. Craig and Leahy of course prefer professional planning. In the tremendously increased Army Air Corps, antiaircraft defenses and other armaments projected by Corcoran & Co., they foresee fundamental changes in balance between Army and Navy, between related branches of the Army.

They could not speak out, but last week several retired officers did so in a symposium published by the United States News. Gruffest was Major General George Van Horn Moseley, who last September directed a blast at the New Deal when he retired. Last week he wrote: "Much of our present weakness is in the fear and hysteria being engendered among the American people for ... political purpose. ... A nation so scared and so burdened financially is not in a condition to lick anybody. And then, who in hell are we afraid of? With Japan absorbed . . . with the balance of power so nearly equal in Europe, where is there an ounce of naval or military strength free to threaten us?"

Columnists, correspondents, Congressmen and such military critics as astute Major George Fielding Eliot (The Ramparts We Watch) wanted to know whom and where the U. S. expects to fight with an expanded Army. Just as big a question after the President's press conference last week was whether he was talking politic bosh with "pay-as-you-go," or whether he was about to haul down his trial balloon, restore Messrs. Craig and Leahy to command, and reduce Rearmament from big talk to a small practical matter for Army, Navy and budget.

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