American Democracy—After War

Extract

More than once in its history, the American Political Science Association has met in a period of national emergency. Our Philadelphia gathering of 1917 (the thirteenth in the series) found the country occupied with a major conflict overseas for which it still was arduously preparing more than eight months after the declaration of a state of war by the Congress. Our Detroit meeting of 1932 (the twenty-eighth, and one of the most thinly attended in a decade) took place at a time when two and a quarter years of industrial depression and social disintegration had cast a pall of pessimism and despair over a national scene so recently—and so deceptively—effulgent, and when there was much shaking of heads over the outlook for our entire political and economic system. Twenty-three years ago this week, indeed, the continuity of our annual conventions was broken by the omission altogether of a meeting which was to have been held in Cleveland, a request having been made by our own sixth president—then in the White House—that railroads groaning under the task of transporting fifty thousand tons of supplies every twenty-four hours for the use of two million soldiers in France (even though no longer actually fighting when our meeting-time came round) should not be burdened with carrying people to gatherings that could be dispensed with or postponed.