National Affairs: Politics in Crisis

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Last week Franklin Roosevelt watched the People. Perhaps excepting Adolf Hitler, no man of his time knew so well how to read what he saw, guide his acts by what he read. And the People watched the President. Of all the great peoples on earth, only they were utterly free to look, listen, judge, speak. Men and women called upon their President to be statesman, peacemaker, warrior. He was none of these. As in no other week since he entered the White House, he was the President of a political democracy, a ruling servant who could safely do no more, go no farther down his chosen road than the people were willing to allow.

With the President's great powers he could arouse, shape, channel the emotions of the People towards his ends. With the immense responsibility those powers entailed, he was in duty bound to state his ends clearly, hold himself in check in so far as those ends were not the manifest ends of the U. S. President Roosevelt's ends were known, definite, unneutral: by every means short of war,1) to help Great Britain and France win their war, and 2) to drive Adolf Hitler and Hitlerism from the world. He defined these aims well before World War II began, when many thought that in foretelling the Crisis and its ripening into war, he was whistling for the wind. More eloquent than any poll of the public temper last week was the conclusion of Franklin Roosevelt that he could not prudently restate his ends. Up to last week he had accompanied them with assurances of his hope and belief that the U. S. could stay out of war. Sensitive to a nation sensitized by the fact of war, he conveyed one impression last week: that the U. S. will stay out of war.

Mr. Roosevelt's people in their freedom to be diverse and perverse and confused were afraid of their confusion. In their unease they perforce seized upon familiar precepts and standards whereby to judge themselves and their President. Precepts frequently stated, standards often used may become cliches. Crisis cliches are as likely as any others to be hardily true, are just as likely to be tired symbols of what once was truth. The people with their many voices and no single voice have tried and tested two crises cliches.

The President here & now should renounce a third term. So said Alfred M. Landon last fortnight; so said Michigan's isolationist, Republican Senator Vandenberg last week. "I heartily agree with the President that politics should be adjourned," Mr. Landon had said. "But I submit that he himself should make the first move in that direction by removing the biggest stumbling block of all ... namely, the third term issue."

That the U. S. people in principle oppose third terms for their Presidents is a cliche so long accepted as to be a maxim, although it has never been tested by ballot. It now has a special meaning: a candidate for a second reelection, potential or declared, cannot be a good President in crisis; he may even use the crisis to forward his ambitions.