The Great Blueprint
The U.S. got a big piece of news quite casually last week. The day, suitably, was Memorial Day. After a quick drive to Arlington National Cemetery, Franklin Roosevelt returned to the White House to hold his regular Tuesday press conference. The day was hot. The President faced the 150 newsmen in his shirt sleeves.
Only a few hours before, Secretary of State Cordell Hull had announced that the U.S. had, at last, invited Great Britain, Russia and China to discuss a definite blueprint for a world organization to keep the peace. A correspondent asked a question right down Mr. Roosevelt's alley: "Mr. President, when you were Assistant Secretary of the Navy you supported President Wilson on the League of Nations idea. How do you feel about that now?"
Franklin Roosevelt, obviously sniffing the question with enjoyment, lapsed into his half-confidential, half-professorial manner. Well, he said, you know we are working toward a union of the United Nations, toward the prevention, if we can help it, of another war. But the last time we thought it was the war to end war--we saw it a bit altruistically then. But now, the President said to the correspondents, you've grown a bit older. Some of us, the President added, are inclined to be more cynical--he said he did not include himself in this category.
Blockbuster. The President then quietly dropped his blockbuster. The U.S., he said, has an objective today to join other nations for the general world peace--but without taking away the integrity of the U.S. in any shape, manner or form.
Millions of fervid Roosevelt supporters have assumed and insisted that President Roosevelt is a genuine But the President made nis declaration of "nationalism" with hardly a flicker of a cigaret ash. Having plumped for 100% "integrity," he went on smoothly and solemnly. The nations of the world, said he, have an objective: perhaps they can reach a unanimity which would stop wars before they are started. In a sense, he added, the League of Nations had that very, very great purpose, but that got involved in American politics. That was why he and Secretary of State Hull had been working with Senators on the Foreign Relations Committee and a special committee from the House (see cut). So far, the President added, the consultations had been conducted on a very high plane of nonpartisanship.
Over the Phone. One point the President seemed anxious to make definite: the blueprint shortly to be discussed by the Big Four was just a first draft. The blueprint was a plan to stop aggression, the President said; it did not envision an organization which you would have to call on whenever some country wanted to build a bridge over a creek.
Did this plan follow the League of Nations pattern? You can't follow an old pattern, the President be a 1944 paitein.
^ 4ny1--^_ Altered: You mean like the
Fourteen Points? Oh, no, he said, this plan just contained principles. Would there be a formal conference to thrash out differences? Franklin Roosevelt said he didn't know anything about any conference. Heavens, he added, he could conduct a conversation over the telephone. That was all that there was going to be.
"Sovereignty." After this offhand reference the press conference came to a close. The blueprint had only been shown the press for a minute. But all the reporters saw plainly enough exactly what the President wanted them to see--the clever use of the word "integrity."-
"Integrity" was the Roosevelt word for "sovereignty." This only gradually dawned on the press, and especially slowly on the internationalists. On Friday the President added that he was as much in.favor of U.S. sovereignty as he had ever been; as much as anyone in the room. Franklin Roosevelt was not going to yield any U.S. sovereignty to any international organization.
Finger to the Wind. Only nine months ago, at the Republican Mackinac Conference, Senators Arthur Vandenberg and Robert Taft had drawn hard words from
^melirfternationalists for insisting that the Mackinac Charter pledge itself not to give away American sovereignty. When the President took the same stand, was he isolationist? In hot and heavy debate, internationalists had insisted that "sovereignty" was a wicked, isolationist word. Now the Rooseveltians would have to mix it in with the rest of their omnibus platform.
Many winds of argument had blown since Mackinac in September; Wendell Willkie had been smashed in Wisconsin; in the lack of enlightened leadership toward an effective internationalism, the U.S. people seemed more & more to side with Senator Robert La Follette's reluctance "to buy an international pig in a beautiful poke."
The President, whose wetted forefinger is always held up to catch the direction of the political wind, had now quietly marched full circle around the Republican position. While the G.O.P. had been flogging itself hard to overtake the President on internationalism, Mr. Roosevelt had blandly turned up in their rear, calmly proposing to appropriate their headquarters.
F.D.R., Isolationist. The Chicago Tribune's Arthur Sears Henning, who should know an isolationist when he sees one, wrote an account which was headlined: INTERNATIONAL IDEA SHELVED BY ROOSEVELT SENATORS SEE PEACE PLAN
AS "ISOLATIONIST." Editorially, the Tribune thought the idea was fine--but sturdily refused to believe him. Said the Tribune: "The President's characteristic maneuver before elections is to announce a policy in accord with the opposition's views." Senator Burton K. Wheeler, Democrat & isolationist, observed, with almost diabolical satisfaction, that the President's plan did not go as far on the internationalist side as the Republican's Mackinac Charter.
The Plan. What, actually, did the President's plan propose? Neither the President nor Secretary Hull divulged anything more, but the news leaked. The Great Blueprint, it developed, had been started in February 1942, three months after Pearl Harbor. It had been finished, in its present working-draft form, in May 1943. The President had kept the plan secret until well after Teheran, until he judged the political weather was right.
On high authority, the blueprint was said to call for:
CJ A dominant World Council, composed of the U.S., Great Britain, Russia and China, with three smaller nations to sit in on a rotating basis. Then, of course, the smaller nations could never outvote the Big Four.
Chief job of the big, 35-nation Assembly would be to attempt arbitration of international disputes. If the Assembly failed, the dispute would be referred to the World Court. Failure here would presumably result in action by the World Council--the Big Four.
First outcry against the Great Blueprint came not from U.S. internationalists, who still seemed willing to trust Mr. Roosevelt to any limit--but from the small nations of Europe. Cried Netherlands Foreign Minister Eelco N. van Kleffens: "The smaller states are made to feel the burden of war no less, and often more acutely, than the very great powers. It seems reasonable, therefore, that they should have their due voice in attempts to prevent war."
This struck home. The following day Cordell Hull, shaking and disturbed, angrily told his press conference that the U.S. had, for 150 years, furthered the freedom of small nations and would continue to do so. He did not see any reason, he said, why the U.S. people had to be catechized on this every morning before breakfast.
That was that. U.S. voters could choose one of two pictures: that the President, a genuine "internationalist," was merely making a bid for some America First votes; or that he had all along been laughing up his sleeve at "internationalism." The Great Blueprint was just the working draft. There were almost certain to be more changes and shifts. In a crucial election year, Franklin Roosevelt was shrewdly working both sides of the street.
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