Party Government and the United States

Abstract

The lack of coherent, powerful, stable, responsible leadership in the national government of the United States is a source of mounting concern to serious students of American politics. So sober an analyst as Professor E. E. Schattschneider states it is reasonable to suppose that the internal difficulties of the government will, sooner or later, if we do not overcome them, involve all of us in disaster. Quotations to a similar effect can be multiplied from observers in all walks of life. It is little short of surprising that a government that has successfully met the seemingly acid tests of the greatest war and the greatest depression in history should be considered so deficient in its very vitals. And yet a powerful case can be made for just this position despite our record of past achievement. That crises have been met and overcome the critic can hardly deny. What he may well maintain is twofold: one, that in our meeting of crises there has been too perilous a dependence on good fortune; and two, that the nature of the world today excludes any safe reliance on the methods of the past. The fate of the Third French Republic with its dependence on a Union SacrJe to produce strong government in time of need is a grim warning to those who still repose their confidence in inspired Presidential dictatorship. Robert Sherwood has recounted the anxious days before Pearl Harbor when even the perennial optimist Roosevelt well-nigh despaired of securing the power to avert the disaster his military staff foresaw. The sorry record of our China policy, set forth in the State Department's White Paper, lends impressive confirmation to Schattschneider's fear that expert knowledge is bootless when leaders lack power and courage to follow it. The spectacle of members of the House of Representatives privately denouncing a Rankin-led pension raid, but in the same breath confessing their inability to vote their convictions on a roll call, fills in the picture of a government dangerously deficient in responsible leadership. The golden age of isolation from world affairs and of an economy whose expansion seemed a gift of nature is gone. And the old easy-going assurance that somehow we will muddle through but measures the