Sleeping Duty

The national fever rose last week. Up zoomed the sales of political buttons. Movie theatres rocked to applause for newsreel shots of the candidates. Everywhere headquarters bloomed with bunting, boomed with antlike activity. Bettors bet more; arguments got louder; radio listeners found less swing and more oratory. The 1940 campaign was really on.

But one thing was strangely missing: one issue which by all historical precedents should have loomed large if not largest in the campaign was at least half-forgotten. At Amarillo, Tex. last week and at Sacramento, Calif. Candidate Willkie told Democrats they had to choose between the tradition of voting for their party and the tradition against a third term. But the low ebb of public attention to the third-term issue was exemplified by hearings held in Washington on Senator Burke's proposed Constitutional amendment for a single, six-year Presidential term: so meagre was the audience that the hearings were transferred from the marble Senate Caucus room to the cozier Claims Committee room.

Yet the argument over how long a President should serve began 153 years ago, before there was a United States, a President or even a Constitution. Monday, May 14, 1787, was fair and clear in Philadelphia as the men from the colonial seats of government began to assemble. Only the day before General George Washington, coming with reluctance from his seat in Virginia, had arrived; he had been met by a troop of horse and the entire populace, while muskets banged and bells chimed in his honor.

Over the cobblestones of Chestnut Street the carriages rolled to the Old State House (Independence Hall). Day after day thereafter the sages, the patriots, the thoughtful men of the Colonial States gathered, debated, voted, reconsidered, revised, labored mightily, always in the light of Ben Franklin's wise words. . . . "We are sent here to consult, not to contend."

In that long, fateful summer's debate no subject was more fully argued, more carefully considered, than the manner of election and the term of office of the Chief Executive. To men who had suffered under monarchy the question of rotation in high office was desperately real, its solution a matter of counsel as grave as prayer. For three days in June, for five days in July, the delegates debated their jealousy of Executive power, a jealousy whose roots ran far back into the American past.

The delegates had generally held, with Hamilton and Madison, that the true source of security in a representative republic came from frequent election and rotation in office, had agreed with George Mason of Virginia that "the very palladium of civil liberty" lay in "that the great officers of State and particularly the Executive, should at fixed periods return to that mass from which they were at first taken, in order that they may feel and respect those rights and interests which are again to be personally valuable to them." Concurred Benjamin Franklin: "In free governments, the rulers are the servants, and the people their superiors. For the former, therefore, to return among the latter was not to degrade but to promote them."

But by September the delegates had swung around more & more to the view of Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, that this doctrine of rotation might form "a political school in which we were always governed by scholars and not by the masters"; that rotation would produce "instability of councils." Morris argued that ineligibility to re-election "tended to destroy the great motive to good behavior, the hope of being rewarded by a reappointment. It was saying to him, make hay while the sun shines."

This view finally prevailed. The Constitution was written, signed, adopted with a four-year term for the Executive, and no mention of ineligibility. The decision on eligibility was left to the people.

In the intervening years, down to last week, on the Constitution's 153rd anniversary, the U. S. people has never finally made that decision. Jefferson, a democrat with a little as well as a big D, made the decision for himself, refused a third term and declared: "Should a President consent to be a candidate for a third election, I trust he would be rejected on this demonstration of ambitious views." But the issue, never joined flatly and directly in an election, always remained a matter of vital concern. Theodore Roosevelt stepped down after his second term but changed his mind four years later and lost his chance for a third term (nonconsecutive) chiefly through a party split.

Last week no great anti-Third-Term voice but Willkie's cried abroad in the land--and he did not concentrate his case against Term III but against the New Deal. Two voices too politically accursed to be audible from the hustings came last week from men whose public position assured them a respectful hearing in the press: Wall Street's No. 1 lawyer, eloquent John W. Davis, onetime (1924) Democratic Presidential nominee, and wealthy, aged (86) Jacob Gould Schurman, educator and onetime Ambassador to Germany, who received an Olympic medal from Adolf Hitler in 1936 for his praise of Nazi doctrines.

Said Mr. Davis: "The man is not yet born of woman to whom I would entrust for more than eight years at the most the vast, the expanding, the fateful powers of the Presidency." Whether the U. S. people shared his distrust remained to be seen. But the question had not yet been raised on high, to be explored, pondered, decided. Wendell Willkie had not yet been able to attract the nation's attention to it. Franklin Roosevelt was certainly not going to.

Only once before in U. S. history, when Roosevelt I ran in 1912, had the U. S. people had a chance to vote on sending a man to the White House for a Third Term. Never before had the people had a chance to vote whether a President should be allowed to spend twelve consecutive years in the White House. Yet there was a fair chance that an issue older than the Republic might be settled in 1940 by default.

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