National Affairs: Call to Arms

Wearing a green carnation in his buttonhole, President Truman walked briskly into the great House chamber. In face of a cold audience of Representatives and Senators, he flipped open a brown notebook and read from it. Though he looked like a man who was in a hurry to be off to a St. Patrick’s Day parade, the President had something to say; he said it as earnestly and forcefully as he could. He issued a call to arms.

“It is this ruthless course of action [of the Soviet Union],” he said, “and the clear design to extend it to the remaining free nations of Europe, that have brought about the critical situation in Europe today.” It was his duty, he said, to recommend the measures which would “give support to the free and democratic nations of Europe and to improve the solid foundation of our own national strength.”

The measures he recommended: 1) the speedy passage of ERP; 2) “universal training legislation”; 3) “temporary” selective service.

Then he went off to his parade in Manhattan.

He could be sure of support for speedy enactment of ERP; the House Foreign Affairs Committee voted out its omnibus foreign-aid bill at week’s end. But there was scarcely anything Harry Truman could have recommended that could have aroused more controversy than U.M.T. and a peacetime draft.

No Shock, No Surprise. The congressional reaction was privately violent. Bob Taft was critical because the President had not mentioned a bigger air force. Illinois Republican Leo Allen, who has kept U.M.T. bottled up in his House Rules Committee, said coldly that there was “no more prospect” for a vote now than there had been before. The President was damned on all sides. In a normal world, his program would have sunk without a trace.

But it was not a normal world, a fact of which Congress as well as the President was now well aware. Before the week was out, Congressmen realized also that the President’s speech was only the first step in a new, cold and hard-boiled U.S. foreign policy.

And before the week was out, the U.S. people were beginning to be heard. They had half expected that Harry Truman was going to ask for immediate mobilization. They were neither shocked nor surprised at his identification of Communist Russia as the enemy of their nation. His speech merely confirmed their views, although they still did not fully understand the crisis, which they thought should have been spelled out with more facts.

They Were Ready. They were “just plain scared” at the thought of another war. But most were resigned to the idea that “we’ve got to stop Russia.” They were divided over U.M.T. and selective service; for one thing, they did not understand how the two operations would function, how they would be separated, or whether both were necessary. But they were convinced that hundreds of thousands of Americans had to put on uniforms. They were ready to believe George Marshall: that the nation had to regain “a reasonable military posture.”

The first question they asked was: “How will this affect me?” The second: “Why did the President wait so long?”