Stassen’s Seven Points

The demands for “a people’s peace”—whatever that may be—are growing. From all parties, from all sections have come the voices of men insistent that at war’s end there be some kind of world group of nations in which the U.S. will lead. Henry Wallace, Sumner Welles, Wendell Willkie have made eloquent pleas.

Fortnight ago, Minnesota’s silo-sized Republican Governor Harold E. Stassen proposed a “world association of free peoples.” It would require minimum standards of its members: religious freedom, fair internal justice, elective governments. Stassen suggested it could set up:

> Temporary governments over each of the Axis nations.

> An airways commission to control the international airports of the future.

> An administrative body to control the gateways of the seven seas.

> An educational commission whose prime job would be to increase the literacy of all peoples.

> A code of justice.

> A “world legion,” or supreme world police force, which would make unnecessary the balance-of-power system.

Here was a concrete post-war plan. Realistic Harold Stassen did not mean it to be in any way final. Paraphrasing another Midwesterner, he said: “We must now say that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall gradually spread throughout the earth.”