While Europe Burns

Congress debated conscription last week. During the speeches, citizens in the crowded galleries often saw less than half of their Senators and Representatives on the floor. So many Democrats stayed away from the House that Administration captains had to postpone a crucial vote on the bill empowering the President to mobilize the National Guard, finally got it passed (342-to-33). But habitues of the Senate galleries seldom failed to see a worn, bent figure in white, listening intently, some times speaking, constantly interjecting query and quibble. He was Nebraska's 79-year-old George W. Norris.

Yes & No. Sad, puzzled, torn at heart was George Norris, and he told the Senate why: "Conscription is contrary to the spirit of human freedom ... in time it will ruin democracy." Yet: "I concede that they [the dictators] would like to conquer the U. S. . . ." Yet again: he would rather "see the end come and cross the river into all eternity," than see one-half of the U. S. toiling and sweating to support the other half under arms. He could concede that conscription was "the fair way to raise an army." But he could not support conscription in peacetime, even in the uneasy peace which troubled the U. S. last week.

Wheeler of Montana, Vandenberg of Michigan, Clark of Missouri cried that conscription was dictatorial, unnecessary, an Army scheme to make more generals and colonels, silly because the Atlantic still lay between the U. S. and Hitler. Ohio's plodding Taft did not deny that trained men were needed, proposed to get them by creating a volunteer corps of 1,250,000 trained reserves. Dug from the files of the New Hampshire Historical Society was a speech by Daniel Webster, opposing "Mr. Monroe's draft" in the third year of the War of 1812. Senators who heard the quoted words of Daniel Webster last week found that changed U. S. circumstances had not greatly altered arguments against conscription. Congressman Webster on Dec. 9, 1814 put his trust in volunteers (who finally won the war). He could not argue that invasion was impossible, since a successful British invasion had already burned part of the Capital. But he said: "The question is nothing less than whether the most essential rights of personal liberty will be surrendered, and despotism embraced in its worst form. . . . The people have too fresh and strong a feeling of the blessings of civil liberty. . . . Similar pretenses, they know, are the grave in which the liberties of other nations have been buried. . . ." Messrs, Wheeler, Clark, Vandenberg, Taft, Norris did their best to echo him last week.

Dully inept was the Congressional defense of conscription. Majority Leader Alben Barkley in the Senate trusted Wheeler, Vandenberg & Co. to wear themselves out with words, the Gallup Poll (71% favored draft for ages 18-32) to offset a continuing flood of anti-conscription mail. Accepting an amendment to up Army pay, "Dear Alben" muffed a cogent argument for compulsory service: that the alleged necessity for the increase augured ill for the Army's chances to get swarms of volunteers. No voice raised in Congress for conscription had the sting and vim which some anonymous satirist achieved last week in a mock petition--to Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Emperor Hirohito--which was circulated in New York.

"Whereas, the undersigned citizens are unalterably opposed to ... the selective compulsory military training bill, preferring to wait in the hopes that a sufficient number of patriotic Americans will volunteer. . . . Therefore ... it is most respectfully requested that any aggressive intentions you may have toward the United States ... be graciously deferred until the United States has been given ample time to strengthen its army, navy and air forces by the volunteer system. . . ."

Congress v. Army. The Army is in no doubt whatever about what it needs, and it is certain that voluntary enlistments cannot do the job. The Navy needs few if any draftees. The Army netted 16,177 three-year volunteers in June, 23,234 in July, can doubtless fill out its Regular forces to 375,000 by ballyhoo and resorting to advertising. But the primary object of peacetime conscription is not to create a standing army; it is to assure the U. S. a huge, rotating reserve of trained man power to be called up quickly in wartime. Thus the General Staff last month hoped to select 400,000 draftees Oct. 1, another 400,000 next April, give them a year's training, return them to civil life and replace them with fresh classes. Selected units of the National Guard meantime would be called in advance, used later to train the conscripts. Last week Assistant Chief of Staff William E. Shedd warned Congress that on account of its past and prospective delays the Army could not now hope to have the first 400,000 conscripts and 220,000 Guardsmen in training before Jan. 1.

Connecticut's Democratic Senator Francis Maloney proposed to give volunteering a further trial until Jan. 1, let the President invoke conscription then if the trial had failed. Many Senators took immediately to Mr. Maloney's idea, probably would have adopted it last week if Alben Barkley had not let them off for a long weekend, so that Republicans could go to Elwood to hear Wendell Willkie.

Said Colorado's Democratic Senator Edwin Johnson, at midweek: "If Willkie straddles the issue, Congress will follow suit by adopting some such straddling amendment as the Maloney proposal." Nominee Willkie did not straddle, with his words for conscription in principle did more than any Congressman last week to save the draft bill. One man who could have done more but failed to do as much last week was Franklin Roosevelt (who had already endorsed conscription in principle, had yet to give the pending bill his specific support). The President instead let Ambassador William Christian Bullitt speak for him, say to Senators like Burton Wheeler and George Norris:

"Recently I heard a Senator who is as good an American as any of us state that while he would favor conscription the moment we should be attacked, he would oppose conscription until after we should have been attacked. The ruined homes of France, the women and children starving on the roads, cry out to him. . . . The dictators . . . count ... on honorable men like that Senator.''

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