MR. ROOSEVELT AID THE FUTURE T HE United States goes to
the polls next Tuesday, and unless every omen is fallacious it will elect Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt President for a further four years. Whatever lingering doubts there may be as to the result of the election, there can be none of its character. It is a plebiscite for or against Mr. Roosevelt, and a re-election of the President would be a victory for him, not for his party, and a victory for his personality and attitude rather than for any defined policy. Such a victory would have its special significance in these days when the prospects for democracy seem so gloomy. So many commen- tators, from Mr. Lloyd George downwards, have stressed the claims of the dictatorial governments to be able to work with a speed and decision appar- ently impossible to democracies, that the decision of the most powerful nation in the world to entrust its destinies again to Mr. Roosevelt would have more than ordinary significance. For the President, what- ever his faults, has not displayed either undue caution or a fondness for the time-wasting and point- evading devices attributed to democratic statesmen. The American election is a demonstration that there is a demand for resolute and bold government— and a sign that it can be provided by other means than the sacrifice of liberty to the totalitarian state.
It is true that the noisiest, if not most convincing, critics of Mr. Roosevelt have done all in their power to identify him with dictatorship, but the allegation is palpably absurd. It is idle to compare the President to Hitler or Mussolini or Stalin. Denunciations of presidential absolutism ring curiously false in a world in which real tyranny is so abundantly represented, and in which the incompatibility of dictatorship and free criticism has been made manifest by so many striking examples. Mr. Frank Knox, for instance, after his months of campaigning as Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, will be able to return to his editorial chair without any serious fears that the Chicago Daily News will have to suffer the fate of the Berliner Tageblatt or the Corriere della Sera. Mr. Alfred Smith and Mr. John W. Davis will wake up on Wednesday with no anticipations that they may share the fate of such party dissidents as Herr Gregor Strasser or Comrades Zinoviev and Kamenev.
If Mr. Roosevelt has done nothing else, he has shown that the naive demand of the average man for action can be satisfied without either an Ogpu or a Gestapo,. without the stifling of criticism . or the murder, exile..or terrorisation,of his opponents. But this lesson is not all that the triumph of the administration teaches. .It has seemed an axiom of American politics, since the defeat of Wilson, that it was always safe to adopt the most intransigent attitude to any dealings with foreign States. In the first part of his administration Mr. Roosevelt showed no desire to imitate. even such timid advances as Mr. Hoover made towards international action. But the nature of things proved highly educative and the patience of Mr. Cordell Hull and the courage of the American Treasury have been rewarded, not merely . by substantial achievements like the trade treaties or the currency truce, but by political advantages. If the administration has learned a good deal, has dared to act on its acquired wisdom and has gained by its boldness, the Republican Party has shown a dogged stubbornness in error and a deter- mination to avoid thought and candour that has been the despair of some of its more enlightened members and has driven back to the Democratic camp such bitter and able critics of the administration as Mr. James Warburg. It was thought (or hoped) that the Republicans' declared determination to collect the War debts and thereby impede international trade even further was only a piece of political window- dressing, put in to salve the consciences of the veterans who had contributed the Smoot-Hawley tariff to the troubles of a sufficiently distracted world. But as the campaign progressed, and, from the Republican point of view, from bad to worse, the temptation to appeal for easy votes to the assumed vast reservoir of permanent xenophobia, proved too much, and it is hardly excessive to say that if Mr. Landon is elected he will have been committed by some of his more noisy allies (one can hardly call them sup- porters) to an economic policy far more to the taste of the Nazi apostles of autarky than to that of Dr. Schacht. Even if he saw light and threw his sup- porters over, he would have to face a Senate in which no Republican triumph could overthrow the present Democratic majority, and in which the temptation to bedevil President Landon, as Senator Lodge and his allies did Wilson, would almost certainly be too much for political human nature.
One other aspect of the election, while it concerns the United States primarily rather than Europe, is yet of considerable interest to Europe. Had Mr.
Landon been allowed to follow his own bent, it is probable that he would have offered, in internal affairs, an alternative to the New Deal that would have been near enough to it in spirit to win many voters from Mr. Roosevelt. But the old disharmony in the Republican Party proved too much for him.
His eastern supporters wanted no compromise. They had opposed nearly every social achievement of the administration, not only as badly planned or as badly executed, but as wrong and needless from beginning to end. There has been in Wall Street, and in other centres where the Wall Street outlook prevails, an obstinate refusal to understand the moral damage done to the prestige of the business rulers of America by the collapse of 1929. The belief that there was nothing seriously wrong with the system that ended in the dreadful years from 1929 to 1933, and the further belief that the average man could be made to see this, ruined the Republicans' chances of success at the Congressional elections of 1934. The eastern leaders of the Republican Party have been at least as much a liability as an asset to it, for their attitude intensified the inclination of the Middle-West farmers to support the President who had saved them from disaster. Mr. Roosevelt, with the election impending, has had to pick his way . warily in the last eighteen months. If he wins his hands will be free, for a third terra is as unattainable an ambition as it ever was, That may mean a great deal.
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