Forward Step

In high good humor, old Cordell Hull called in a bipartisan group of Congressmen to announce the news: Dumbarton Oaks was winding up its work. The U.S., Britain and Russia had seen eye-to-eye on the Great Blueprint for world organization. Minor details could wait. The important fact, said the Secretary of State, was that the Big Three, in peace as in war, have a common aim. The 39 delegates had nothing much left to do but wait for final nods from their respective Governments. Then the Chinese, who have been watching intently from just outside the Dumbarton Oaks' high brick wall, will move in formally and make the plan fit a Big Four.

The Great Blueprint was close to the original American plan (TIME, June 12):

The Assembly, all have agreed, would be the large group of representatives from all big & little "peace-loving" nations. Like the U.S. House, it would debate issues, initiate motions, make recommendations. Each nation would have one vote.

The Council, dominated by the Big Four (which France later might make Five), would actually control the organization by making all the major decisions. Seven small nations, elected by the Assembly and serving in rotation on the Council, would have a theoretical majority vote. But the Council could not call out the armies against an aggressor without unanimous vote of the Big Four. (The Chinese do not think a party to a dispute should have a vote in settling the dispute; they have observed that the Blueprint makes no provision for checking possible aggression by one of the Big Four--but they will probably not press the point.) Small nations most likely to sit in on the first Council sessions: Brazil, Mexico, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Iran.

The Court of International Justice, set up to arbitrate disputes, would be a modern version of the World Court.

Territories taken over from the Axis would be held in "trusteeship," on the theory that the people living in the territories might eventually become self-governing. This appeared to be an adaptation of the Versailles Treaty's mandate system, but this time the Council, rather than individual nations, would supervise.

Commissions to study trade, labor, white slavery, narcotics, etc., etc. would carry on in the League of Nations pattern.

Some time soon, Cordell Hull hinted, Big Four statesmen of a higher rank than the Dumbarton Oaks delegates will get together and approve this tentative outline. Early in 1945, the plan will be presented to the U.S. Senate in full-blown treaty form, and then at last the U.S. may hear the many-times postponed Great Debate.

Prewar isolationists like Wisconsin's Progressive Senator Bob LaFollette sniffed suspiciously at the Great Blueprint, as if it were a new League of Nations in a slick disguise. Senator Bob's tight grip on his own Progressive Party may be slipping* but in Washington he is still a man to be reckoned with. As a Foreign Relations Committeeman whose Senate seat is good until January 1947, his voice may carry far in the Great Debate. Last week The Progressive, official weekly organ of La Follette's party, complained of "the almost frenzied haste with which the Administration is driving for establishment of the international agency which will permit the great powers to govern the world."

From another side of the ideological field Dumbarton Oaks was also attacked. The leftist Nation was encouraged by the fact that the Big Four had decided to work together in peace, no matter how. But the whole Blueprint reminded the Nation of an old-fashioned four-power alliance.

In the Senate, Michigan's sober Arthur H. Vandenberg mulled the question that will perplex the U.S. for months to come: "What shall we say ... to govern our own American delegate when he is called upon finally to vote in respect to the use of force . . . without the constitutional concurrence of Congress? That will raise a very interesting question. ... It cannot be settled at Dumbarton Oaks. It cannot be settled by any international conference. It is nobody's business but ours. . . ."

* Last month in Madison, convening Progressives took a historic step: they balked at the foreign policy views of a LaFollette. While Bob LaFollette sat in sullen silence at the word "enforce," Progressive platform writers endorsed a world organization "to enforce a just and democratic peace." This was a significant reversal of the LaFollette-inspired America Firstish plank adopted in May, and followed the worst licking the Wisconsin electorate ever gave the Progressivce party in a primary.

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