Mr. Gurney’s Convictions

South Dakota’s short, round-cheeked Senator Chan Gurney stood up last week and rocked the boat. His fellow Congressmen fully expect to amend the Selective Service Act to draft boys of 18 and 19. Last May, Brigadier General Lewis B. Hershey, boss of Selective Service came out flatly for it. Realistic Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War (who is afraid of no man, not even voters), said it must be done. But Congress—and evidently the President, for he said nothing—decided it was politically safer to stall until after the November elections. So Chan Gurney shouldn’t have brought up the subject. But last week he did. He said the time is now and tossed a bill into the hopper.

Republican Gurney, soft-spoken yet determined, has made few speeches in his four years in the Senate. But this time he told his colleagues of a 7,000-mile trip he had taken through southern army camps and back to his home State. He had talked with privates, officers and civilians—bankers, ditchdiggers, merchants, tourists—and he found that “the American people want to win the war in the shortest poSsible fashion and will do what it takes to accomplish that.” One of the main things it takes, Chan Gurney said, is the immediate drafting of 18-and 19-year-olds.

Chan Gurney’s ancestors went to South Dakota in a covered wagon, established a seed and nursery business at Yankton. Chan never went farther than the Yankton high school. He eased into the family business, enlisted in World War I, served nine months overseas. Chan Gurney has the courage of his convictions. His two sons are in the Air Corps—2nd Lieut. Deloss, 19, and Staff Sergeant John, 20. A member of the Military Affairs Committee, quiet Chan Gurney spends most of his spare time boning up on military matters.

He has always faced the facts of war, voted almost 100% for the Roosevelt foreign policy, and at least once before has been realistically ahead of the Administration. Last October, when the Senate was debating the Administration’s armed merchant-ship bill, he denounced it as a halfway measure, teamed up with two other Republicans, Vermont’s Austin and New Hampshire’s Bridges to fight for outright repeal of the Neutrality Act. They were beaten, but Pearl Harbor proved they were right.

Although a Gallup poll this week showed the people overwhelmingly in favor of drafting 18-and 19-year-olds ahead of married men with children, most Congressmen oppose Gurney’s bill for fear of losing votes. (In the House, New York’s Wadsworth introduced a similar bill this week.) After all, a majority of the people might want the bill, but Congressmen who passed it might find they had alienated the votes of an angry minority without winning votes from the placid majority.