Young Bob Speaks

Since Dec. 7, 1941, Wisconsin's Senator Robert Marion La Follette Jr., who was bitterly isolationist before that historic date, has generally held his peace. But last week the son of the late great pacifist "Old Bob" La Follette stood up in the Senate and spoke for three solid hours. When he had finished, he had given his attentive audience a possible foretaste of angry Senate debate to come.

To his opening statement few could take exception: with world responsibilities now thrust upon it, the U.S., he declared, should strive for a "realistic international organization."

But he doubted that the San Francisco conference--"oversold to the American people . . . [as] the beginning and the end of the peacemaking"--would produce that kind of organization. "The past should teach us that the most beautifully worded and cleverly contrived instrument of enforcement . . . will fail if the final peace settlements are not firmly grounded in principles of justice and freedom."

Tragic Parallels. In the past, as La Follette recalled it, the Quadruple Alliance of 1815, written in language strangely similar to the language of the Crimea Declaration of 1945, failed to prevent war. The Versailles Conference, from which emerged the Big Five of 1918 U.S., Britain, France, Italy, Japan), failed "when the Allied diplomats abandoned principle in favor of shortsighted expediency, relied upon force instead of justice, and betrayed the promises to conquered, neutral and subject peoples. . . ."

Said he: "Thus far we have been traveling a road which almost step by step parallels the tragic road we took after the first World War. . . . We failed when we entered this war to exercise our enormous bargaining powers. . . . All we have achieved [in making U.S. peace aims clear] is in the famous and now almost forgotten Atlantic Charter ... a news release scribbled on pieces of paper."

Try as he might, Young Bob could see no sign of U.S. stiffening. At Casablanca, Quebec, Teheran, Dumbarton Oaks and Yalta, "virtually every compromise has been at the expense of the very principles to which we have committed ourselves."

He looked askance at America's allies, at activities in Central Europe and the Balkans, where Russia (he charged) continued to ignore "her solemn commitments to a program of joint responsibility." Russia, he declared, is today making the same mistakes which France made after World War I, when she placed her faith in "a ring of satellite states."

As for Britain, said Young Bob, "I am convinced that Mr. Churchill's dogmatic and at times arrogant refusal to discuss any definite plans for freedom for the subject people of the British Empire deserves the greatest censure."

Gilded Fac,ade. Describing himself as no perfectionist, Senator La Follette could see no justice and freedom in the machinery now being devised. The best that he could say of San Francisco was that it is "a sincere attempt." But he thought the shortcomings of the security pact that was taking shape should be plain to all:

"[It is] a gilded fac,ade for the old-style military alliance built exclusively on force or the threat of force ... the type of alliance which great European powers have employed all through history without ever preventing a war."

Then he sailed into the veto power arrangements--which are still up in the air (see INTERNATIONAL). Under the proposed arrangement, said the Senator, Japan could have voted herself an acquittal on the seizure of Manchuria. Said he: "I know that it will be said that the present five great powers are peace-loving nations." But Japan, he remembered, was also referred to after the last war as "righteous and peace-loving."

All this seemed to mean that La Follette, a hard and skillful fighter, was going to oppose, when the time came, the U.S. Senate's ratification of whatever charter came out of San Francisco.

Said he: "I cannot underwrite gross violations of the democratic principles which can alone provide a political climate for enduring peace. . . . Let us (never give our consent ... to any extension of slavery, great power domination, or imperialism."

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