Basic Premise

The sharpest clarification of U.S. war aims yet made came this week from Henry Agard Wallace. The country's often abstract and abstracted Vice President suddenly made the basic premise of U.S. thinking as clear as an Arizona summer's day: free enterprise will remain the American way of life.

This pronouncement, from the planner closest to President Roosevelt, from a New Deal "idealist" whose views have been suspect by individualists, is likely to reassure individualists, here & abroad, that plans for world cooperation will not be twisted into some strange new socialistic way of life. It should permit domestic issues to be decided on their own merits, without reference to the old emotion-charged tags of "isolationist" or "interventionist."

"Driving Force." Said Vice President Wallace to an Associated Press interviewer :

"The spirit of competition will and must continue to be one of our main driving forces.

"We can have full employment in this country without destroying private initiative, private capital or private enterprise.

"Government can and must accept the major responsibility for filling in whatever gaps business leaves.

"The more private enterprise succeeds in maintaining full employment, the less Government spending will be required.

"Individual initiative and enterprise, and government responsibility for the general welfare, will continue to pull in double harness for a better life for our people. . . . We need the driving force of self-interest to get most of the work of the world done.

"Men must work for what they have. By and large their material reward will continue to be based on how skilled they become. ... If we can work out the ways to keep production going on an equally high level after the fighting ends, every family can enjoy a comfortable income, even though there continue to be wide differences between what is earned by skilled professional men, or inventors, or daring business men, and what average workers earn."

Driving Ahead. But, warned Henry Wallace, he did not propose a return to laissez faire:

"To the extent that there are areas of unemployment left, despite . . . efforts by business, government must and will step in to see that all people have opportunities for work and to establish such minimum standards of living that no member of the community suffers. . . . [Social security measures] are not inconsistent with the principle that hard work must be rewarded to encourage workers to do their best. . . .

"We cannot go back to the complete lack of economic responsibility and insure full employment at the same time. I hope that some kinds of easy money-making are gone for good--money made by the old-fashioned manipulation of security markets and of speculative commodity markets, or by the unrestricted use of business monopoly powers. ..."

For himself and the Administration, Henry Wallace had spoken. Now that their point of view had been clarified, the postwar debate could make better sense.

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