Monday, Feb. 16, 1942

Call to Battle

Two days after Pearl Harbor, the chairmen of the Democratic and Republican Parties--Ed Flynn and Joe Martin--informed the President that they had formally agreed to adjourn politics "for the duration."

Last week "the duration" ended with a bang.

Pewter-haired, gum-champing Ed Flynn started it. Said he: ". . . No misfortune except a major military defeat could befall this country to the extent involved in the election of a Congress hostile to the President. ... It is now plain that the Republican Party is not so much interested in winning the war as ... in controlling the House of Representatives."

Homespun, placid Joe Martin got mad. He took Ed Flynn's remarks as an invitation to battle. Republican Leader Wendell Willkie took them as a tragedy. In a Syracuse, N.Y. speech Republican Willkie said that the "greatest disaster" that could befall America now would be for her to be conducted down "the route of pure partisanship."

Five days later Democrat Franklin Roosevelt professed ignorance of the Flynn speech and its contents. Behind him. at the press conference, as usual, sat his political adviser, Charles Michelson, who is Flynn's $25,000-a-year right-hand man and edits all his speeches. The President said: When the country is at war, we want Congressmen, regardless of party, who will back up the Government of the United States and who have a record of backing up the country in an emergency--regardless of party.

Wiseacres began to parse the President's phrases, came out with a translation: the President was going to keep hands off the autumn elections--except in the case of the onetime isolationists. No matter how you parsed that, that meant the Republicans.

Unquestionably there was a Republican handful of Congressmen that the President could not openly oppose, as well as a double handful of Democrats he would be delighted to see beaten. But on their Congressional record, most of the G.O.P. Congressmen would be fair game. In short, the President, while seeming to reject "politics as usual" during wartime, actually was getting ready to espouse it with hearty indirectness. The example of Woodrow Wilson in 1918 was strong in the memories of all. That War President had been politically inept enough to ask directly for the election of a Democratic Congress--and had taken a shellacking that lost him the House, the Senate and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee--where the fate of his League of Nations later rested.

Franklin Roosevelt asked only the election of Congressmen who had backed up their Government during a national emergency.

Political realists thought the President had made a political master stroke--playing the game without the name. But others, political amateurs, remembered the lesson of recent history--that voters now shift back & forth across party lines without regard to labels.

One of the most vigorous of political amateurs, Miss Dorothy Thompson, columned her opinion that the 1942 Congressional elections had three possible outcomes: 1) the Flynn way, meaning a Congress loaded with Flynn-type Democratic politicians; 2) the die-hard Republican way, in which enough of the "kill-Roosevelt crowd" and the isolationists would be elected to stultify all legislation; or 3) the Willkie-Roosevelt way, which would mean (said Miss Thompson) the election of men loyal to the national program, not partisan-minded, but national-minded.

There was always a chance. But there was still the old, old difficulty: that U.S. citizens seldom awake to the importance of an election until election time, and then, especially in Congressional elections, find they must choose between two equally bad candidates.

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