FOREIGN RELATIONS: Time to Speak Up

Two Midwest Senators who disagree wholeheartedly on almost every detail of U.S. foreign policy saw eye to eye last week on one point. Both thought it high time for the two Presidential candidates to make a few clear, forceful statements about the questions that emerged at Dumbarton Oaks.

Wisconsin’s prewar isolationist Bob La Follette wrote in his official party paper, The Progressive: “It is time to speak up. To speak up with an American peace program which would capture the imagination and win the hearts of people everywhere. But instead of speaking up, President Roosevelt and Governor Dewey seem to have entered into a conspiracy of silence. . . .”

Minnesota’s ardent internationalist Joe Ball said: “We can’t fiddle around. . . . Time is short. I urge all Americans . . . to insist upon clear, unequivocal answers . . . from Presidential and Congressional nominees. Safe, easy generalities . . . are not enough. . . .”

Having agreed on this single point, each Senator rapidly retired to his own side of the ideological street. Bob La Follette took his stand as a hardheaded U.S. nationalist whose Midwest idealism has made him suspicious of foreign entanglements. Joe Ball, whose Midwest idealism has fired him with the vision of a warless world, pushed ahead to the farthest outpost of internationalist thought.

“Tiny Squeak.” Senator La Follette’s chief complaint against U.S. foreign policy: “Our failure to step forward with an American democratic alternative” to British imperialism and Russian power politics. Said he: “The people wonder if they are to be committed now to enforce a peace settlement which violates American principles of freedom and democracy.” And what, the Senator asked, is to be done about the chaos in Italy, the policy toward Franco, the fate of the Poles? “The American people wonder about our policy in the Far East. Do we favor a strong China or do we side with the British and Russians in their desire to keep China weak? . . . As we wrest the Pacific islands from Japan at such cost in American blood, do we retain them or return them to the various claimant nations?”

Bob La Follette also asked what is to become of American-built air bases; of the vast American merchant marine. Then he argued that while U.S. troops are in the field, the U.S. must “use our bargaining power to wring democratic, anti-imperialistic concessions from our allies.” People all over the world are “electrified by our might” but “dismayed to hear that the voice of this giant is only a tiny squeak in the councils of the victorious powers.”

No Choice. This is exactly the cautious, “yes, but” approach to world cooperation which sets Joe Ball’s teeth most on edge. He passionately believes that a world-security organization can be quibbled and argued right out of existence if the U.S. 1) waits to haggle over peace terms, or 2) ties up every United Nations decision until Congress has considered and debated each individual issue. To Joe Ball, U.S. participation in world affairs is an inescapable responsibility—not a matter of choice. The U.S. cannot delay cooperation until peace terms are satisfactory to each & every U.S. citizen. “Chances of peace terms being even reasonably satisfactory to a majority of Americans are remote. So, let us assume we dislike the peace terms intensely whenever they are made. I say that this does not lessen the demand for our participation in an organization to enforce the peace.”

Joe Ball mentioned no names, but he had some of his own colleagues in mind when he said: “Isolationists, nationalists, American imperialists and others . . . give lip service to the principle of world organization but sabotage every effort to make it effective.”