ORGANIZATIONS: Elijah *from Missoula

Elijah from Missoula (See Cover)

The call to arms came from Edmund Orgill, Memphis' leading hardware wholesaler: "Come out tonight and help us! Are you ready for peace in this world? You are the people, the men behind desks ... in the factories . . . You are the housewives." The Press-Scimitar put Mr. Orgill's message on its front page. In a drizzly rain one night last week 300 earnest Memphians went to the Parkview Hotel to see what they could do about peace in the world.

They were civic leaders, veterans, labor leaders, teachers, students, businessmen, lawyers, priests and ministers. They were people who thought that there was a solution to the nation's international problems beyond supporting the Marshall Plan, the Atlantic pact, and the rearmament of Europe. They believed that the State Department and the Congress could do better than that.

The sense of the meeting was that U.S. foreign policy was failing. Dr. William Lovejoy, who had served overseas, stood up to say that he had seen lands liberated and freedom expanded during the war—"I had faith then in the mission of America." Now—"those who trusted us are becoming sick at heart." Two days earlier, Tennessee's junior Senator, Estes Kefauver, had taken the floor in Washington to jump on the State Department for not seeing "the need of arming our people with any powerful idea." He had an idea—the same one as the people in the Parkview Hotel. Senator Kefauver had embodied it in a resolution, but the State Department, he said, "turns up its nose" at it. Unanimously the little group of Memphis citizens demanded that his resolution be brought out of committee for a full-dress Senate debate.

The Memphis meeting was a reflection of the way some anxious Americans felt and, for that matter, the way some Congressmen felt. Filed away in committees of both houses was a wide assortment of ideas for world peace, from proposals to prop up the United Nations to grandiose schemes for a world constitution. There are 44 such resolutions in the House with more than 100 supporters; there are eight resolutions in the Senate with more than 40 supporters.

Kefauver's was one of these. His resolution proposed that the U.S. invite the other six original sponsoring nations of the North Atlantic Treaty (Britain, France, Canada, The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg) to a convention to "explore how far their peoples" would go in uniting under one government—an Atlantic Union.

The idea was not originally Kefauver's. Ed Orgill's crowd had sold him on it, and then had backed him in Kefauver's spectacularly successful Senate race against the Memphis machine of Boss Ed Crump. The plan was not originally Orgill's either. It had had its origin in the mind of an ex-newspaperman, a gentle, dogged and dedicated crusader named Clarence Kirsh-man Streit (rhymes with fight).