POLITICAL NOTES: Subcapitals

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None had kept track of its serial number, but last week another brand new New Deal notion rolled smartly off the line of the hustling Washington plant of Roosevelt & Co. Last to be turned out in 1935, the idea was probably as advanced as any that will be produced in 1936.

Instead of having some 108 different arrangements of Federal regions and headquarters throughout the Union, reasoned the National Resources Committee (which includes five Cabineteers and Harry Hopkins), why not establish ten or twelve "Little Washingtons" or Federal subcapitals?

Declared the Committee report: "Federal authorities of a regional-functional nature, of the general type of the Tennessee Valley Authority, should be given serious consideration as a means of dealing with types of subnational problems. . . . Problem areas, manufacturing areas, lines of transportation, corn, cotton, citrus, watersheds, timber are no respecters of political boundaries and yet may create problems that require public attention. . . . The fact that state boundaries are firmly embedded in the Constitution has led to a search for means of setting these regional or subnational interests into the framework of the American nation. . . . The regions need not have fixed boundaries. By the same token the region need have no definite body of citizens. Many citizens may consider themselves as belonging to one region for one purpose and to an adjoining region for another."

To that section of the population which believes that States Rights is the only thing left between the U. S. A. and the U. S. S. A., the Committee's recommendations looked like a first step toward a Federal dictatorship. The American Liberty League at once derided the suggested "satrapies" as evidence that Washington "is rapidly becoming inadequate for the horde of playboy experimenters who have taken up their abode on the banks of the Potomac. . . . Dictatorial governments almost universally have adopted this plan."