This Above All

President Roosevelt is going to his second Big Three meeting with an asset he did not have in full measure at Teheran. He takes with him the crystallized support of the U.S. people for everything that he may need to do to establish the U.S. in the world's postwar business. The only question is what he intends to do with his unique grant of power.

It may be, as Internationalist John Foster Dulles said last week in Cleveland (see Foreign Relations), that the U.S. people still do not quite know what they mean when they say that they are ready to lug a full load in world affairs. But every visible indication of U.S. opinion shows not only that they do say so, but that in recent weeks they have found a specific, all-important point of agreement in their ways of saying so. They have increasingly agreed that the use of power in "power politics" is 1) necessary, and 2) not inevitably bad. Some of the indications:

P: The President himself. Never insensitive and sometimes oversensitive to popular currents, he is talking in terms of concrete responsibility which he never before dared to use. Specifically, he framed his recent state-of-the-nation message in such terms (TIME, Jan. 15).

P: The Press. Mr. Roosevelt did not have to take any trail-blazing chances when he adopted the terms of specific U.S. responsibility abroad. He followed a trail blazed by Walter Lippmann, the New York Times, LIFE, many another commentator and journal.

P: The Protestant Churches (see below). Not only did their spokesmen in Cleveland swallow Dumbarton Oaks with all its flaws, but in their appended criticisms they never once questioned the all-out use of force in maintaining the peace.

P: The plight of "isolation." Last week one of its lingering symbols, in the person of Montana's Burton K. Wheeler, spoke for three hours in the U.S. Senate. His were not the sentiments of traditional isolation. They were the sentiments of internationalism. But Wheeler's failure to recognize the fact and use of force in the current world was notably out of key with the U.S. mood; his speech fell flounder-flat.

P: The home front. TIME correspondents, turning in their usual monthly reports on U.S. moods, found a rise here & there in doubts about Greece, Poland, British policy. But nowhere did they find any important desire to solve the doubts by evading the issues.

P: The soldiers. The saying that the U.S. Army abroad consists of "7,000,000 isolationists" got to be a cliche last year. It probably has the faults of most cliches. Last week a TIME correspondent, freshly arrived in Britain from the U.S., told of an impromptu session with hundreds of homesick airmen. What he found was a deep concern in both domestic and foreign affairs, unmatched by anything he had recently seen or heard of at home.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.