The overwhelming majority of writers on international law seem still inclined to advocate that states only be recognized as legal persons in international law. Since, however, neither the term “state” nor the term “legal personality” is unequivocal, it may well be questioned whether a conclusion reached by means of a mere combination of these terms is adequate to clarify the pertinent problems.

Through constant repetition, the unqualified designation of the state as the only legal person in international law became seemingly self-evident. Yet it should not be overlooked that the concept of the state is much older than the description of the state in terms of legal personality, since the latter terminology does not appear before the middle of the seventeenth century. There seems to be general agreement that Thomas Hobbes originated the usage of speaking of the “state” as a “person,” when he proposed to define a “body politic” as “a multitude of men, united as one person by a common power.”

Americans have had a long and varied experience with military government. The names New Mexico, California, New Orleans, Memphis, Cuba, Manila, Mindanao, Samoa, Guam, Vera Cruz, and Coblenz by no means exhaust the list of places where American military or naval governors have exercised control over civil populations. Virtually no effort has been made before the present war to analyze this experience and to draw from it principles to assist in the solution of the problems of the present and immediate future. Military government is of vast importance for the world of tomorrow. It is the transitional phase between the active conflict of armies and the quiet of an established peace. Military government may be—and has been at times in American history—as important for ultimate solutions as major military campaigns.

“Military government,” according to the official definition set forth in the War Department's Field Manual 27–5, “is that form of government which is established and maintained by a belligerent by force of arms over occupied territory of the enemy and over the inhabitants thereof. In this definition, the term territory of the enemy includes not only the territory of an enemy nation but also domestic territory recovered by military occupation from rebels treated as belligerents.” The definition does not cover the whole range of actual occupations in American experience. Military government should not be thought of entirely in terms of enemy territory or enemy populations.

What are the German people really like? A weird assortment of catchwords and formulas have been put forward, most of them as unscientific as Hitler's own racial doctrines: aggressors throughout the ages, perpetrators of a black record of war and aggression, submissive and obedient regiments, cultural and political romanticists, rebels against the established order, victims of a national inferiority complex, sentimentalists, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and so on. And yet unless the people of the democracies attain a realistic understanding of the Germans there will be a poor chance, after the war is finally won, of attaining a permanent solution of the German problem.

In the articles and books written about the German people in recent months and years, little or no attention has been given to one set of historical facts which is capable of providing a trustworthy and statistically balanced background: the record of popular election results from 1871 to 1933. In the long series of Reichstag elections in this period, the German people as a whole expressed their composite preferences concerning the dominant political issues of the times; and the very multiplicity of the political parties, each with more or less distinct character and policies, provides us with fairly extensive breakdowns of public opinion.

Current press articles and periodical literature, both in the United States and abroad, are manifesting a developing interest in trans-polar aviation and Arctic aërial jurisdiction. Although this interest in Arctic airspace appears to be conceived in the exigencies of the present world conflict, belief in the practicability of air routes traversing the Arctic Basin and joining the great centers of civilization of the two hemispheres was expressed as long ago as shortly after the First World War. Perhaps most vocal of the exponents is the polar explorer and publicist Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who began to stress the positional significance of the Arctic almost twenty years ago.

Meanwhile the feasibility of polar aviation was demonstrated in actual practice. Following a series of experimental flights by dirigible and plane—and once the urge to attain the North Pole via the air materialized in the successful flights of Richard E. Byrd, Roald Amundsen-Lincoln Ellsworth, and Umberto Nobile in 1926 and 1928—polar flying concentrated largely upon the spanning of the Atlantic and Pacific aërial highways between the two hemispheres.

I. THE PROBLEM

Ever since the first regularly scheduled public radio-broadcast in 1920, Congress has played a unique and central rôle in the control of radio-broadcasting. As an agency for legislation, it has created the regulatory mechanisms under which the radio industry functions, and it has written the laws which govern this important area of communications. Congress, in fact, has set the pattern within which the various groups and interests operate, subject, of course, to the working rules of the capitalist order. In doing so, Congressmen have been at the beck and call of millions of constituents interested in radio as listeners or broadcasters, as educators or clergymen, as big or little business men. In caring for all of these varying interests, Congress has concerned itself with a few broad problems: what is heard on the radio, who shall control what is heard, who is able to hear what goes over the air, and who profits from radio. But Senators and Representatives are not merely the puppets of various pressures; they have a distinct political interest in programming, profits, and control. They have in radio a potent molder of public opinion—a powerful instrument which can help them to victory or defeat in the next election—and they have used it and will continue to use it to serve their personal fortunes, their parties, and their platforms.

Custom has decreed that the president of this Association, as almost his final act before leaving his briefly-held office, shall deliver an address to those of his colleagues who are hardy enough to assemble to hear him. In this address he endeavors to give something of his best thought concerning some political question. Thereby he generally contrives, also, to convey to his fellow-members something of a feeling of corporate unity and a sense of professional direction.

As my thoughts have turned recently toward the consideration of political science as a whole, as a unified discipline, and as a factor in the government of man, I thought I would discuss with you the question of the rôle of political science in the conduct and preservation of what we now call democratic government.

Standing before you a year ago, President Frederic Austin Ogg spoke thoughtfully and with eloquence of American democracy after the war. He directed his remarks in part to the gloomy predictions of various speculative writers who prophesy the end in our age of democracy and constitutional government. With masterly competence, he showed that the modern trend toward strong executive leadership is not at all the same as a drift into dictatorship. In the United States this trend primarily means that the executive office is being developed to fulfil its true function in a democracy that intends to become stronger, more active, and more efficient.

These may be “the times that try men's souls,” as President Roosevelt recently told the nation, but they may also be the times when free and courageous men may push forward toward the better society of which Thomas Paine dreamed when he pleaded with the colonists for unity in the cause of freedom. When Paine first wrote those words 165 years ago, America had an opportunity to break away from the tyranny of Europe. But Paine was not content to win a war of independence for America alone. Like many today, he talked of world revolution aimed at the tyranny of the few over the many. He, too, argued that men—all men—should have an equal opportunity to shape their own destinies and the destiny of the world in which they found themselves. In an era when men are fighting to preserve and extend a heritage of freedom, it would be well to reëxamine the ideas of Paine, whose writings inspired men of his day in America, in England, and in France to work and to die that they might be free.

Congress established a policy for wartime radio under Section 606 of the Communications Act of 1934 when it gave the President power to take over the entire radio industry in time of war or national emergency. He took advantage of this in September, 1940, when by an executive order he created the Board of War Communications (previously the Defense Communications Board). In the 1934 act, too, he was given wide authority to suspend the FCC rules and to close stations or to use them as he saw fit. In September, 1939, when a state of “limited national emergency” was declared, there was speculation as to the effect that this section would have on the broadcasting industry. Certain Congressmen showed an inclination to back down from the principle of broad Presidential powers over radio. Representative Ditter's bill of 1940, enthusiastically supported by the broadcasting industry, was intended to curb the wide powers the Communications Act had conferred upon the President. This bill, never acted upon, would have added a provision that no transmitter might be confiscated or silenced because of the “character or contents of any program” or in order to permit the government to engage in or control broadcasting, except upon proclamation by the President that the United States was actually at war.

Previously, Congress had enacted some legislation which is pertinent to the war. In 1932, for example, a law was passed that licenses should be issued to qualified United States citizens only, and in 1941, by a new act, the Commission was enabled to consider the character and capacity of potential licensees in order to guard against “subversive” individuals.

The chief lesson of the war to date for constitutional interpretation is that the Constitution is an easily dispensable factor of our war effort—perhaps one might say an “expendable” factor. That the Constitution is not needed as a source of national power for war purposes has been stated by the Court itself. Speaking in 1936 for himself and brethren in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation, Justice Sutherland said: “The investment of the Federal government with the powers of external sovereignty did not depend upon the affirmative grants of the Constitution. The powers to declare and wage war [my italics], to conclude peace, to make treaties, to maintain diplomatic relations with other sovereignties, if they had never been mentioned in the Constitution, would have been vested in the Federal government as necessary concomitants of nationality” (299 U.S. 304, 318).

Almost every age in human history has developed philosophies of ethical and political pacifism which endeavor to treat in their own peculiar way questions raised by the realities of power and violence in human politics. The modern age being no exception, this essay has for its purpose an examination of the conceptions held by two major schools of pacifism in the political thought of the twentieth century. Although their philosophies are closely akin, they are yet sufficiently dissimilar in context and approach to justify separate treatment. With roots deep in the historic soil of past philosophies of non-violence, the twentieth-century interpretations yet strike a note of their own and pose in sharp form some of the most troublesome problems of modern politics.

The first is Hindu pacifism. At its heart is Hindu religious philosophy, which holds to the conception of a world in which individuals are separated from the whole, or from God. Desire and lust after the things of the world constantly keep men from losing themselves in the Reality which this world tends to hide or make obscure. The universe is dualistic: the material is evil, the non-material, or spiritual, good.

The chief reason for the lack of intelligibility in a course in the history of political thought is the absence of any standard by which the great writers in the field may justly be compared. The usual course in the history of political thought is thoroughly historical and scrupulously indifferent to philosophical analysis; at best, a semblance of comparative analysis is achieved by simply telling the student that different needs of different periods suggest different and equally valid theoretical constructions. The question of natural law, for example, is handled in something like the following fashion. The Aristotelian notion of natural law is no sooner inadequately in the mind of the student than it fails to survive the downfall of the Greek city states. The student is told that Aristotle's notion of natural law restricted his vision and blinded him to the inevitable growth of the empire of Philip, his own student. The Stoics, whose views were perfected by Cicero, held to a notion of natural law much more in keeping with the needs of a world civilization. The Church adopted the Stoic conception of natural law. Subsequently, after the writings of Aristotle had been discovered, St. Thomas Aquinas wedded natural law to the law of the Church. The Renaissance and Reformation liberated men's minds from the shackles of Mediaeval Scholasticism. The concept of natural law came gradually to be abandoned; it is already repudiated in the writings of William of Occam and Marsilius of Padua, and its disappearance is complete in Machiavelli. Accustomed to the tradition of 1066 and All That, the student gathers that this disappearance was “a good thing.” In the eighteenth century, there is a revival of natural law.

Among the numerous recent clashes between the Chief Executive and Congress, only one poses fundamental constitutional issues. This conflict has arisen from the efforts of Congress to drive three well-known liberals out of the federal service. On September 14, President Roosevelt submitted a special message to Congress, as forecast in his press conference of July 13, recording his view that the action in question was “not only unwise and discriminatory, but unconstitutional” as an “unwarranted encroachment upon the authority of both the executive and the judicial branches,” and hence not binding upon them. The following commentary is offered by a participant observer in the hope that it may help to clarify the climate of Congressional opinion and explain in some degree why defense of the Constitution and subversion of the Constitution have become confused in the national legislature.

Anti-Comintern on Capitol Hill. On February 1, 1943, Martin Dies of Texas arose on the floor of the House on a question of personal privilege to defend himself against allegations by the National Lawyers' Guild and The New Republic that he was giving aid and comfort to the Axis Powers. In the course of his two-hour address (Cong. Record, 78th Cong., 1st Sess., Vol. 89, pp. 504–516), he assailed 39 named officials in various executive agencies as “irresponsible, unrepresentative, radical, and crackpot.”

The face-to-face war information program of the federal government came to a close on July 15, 1943. On this date the Organizations Service Division of the Office of Civilian Defense was abolished by James A. Landis, director of OCD. Thus ended the last remaining organized effort of the national government to insure full civilian understanding of the war through methods found only in democratic countries, viz., discussions, forums, town meetings, etc. This change in the conduct of the war deserves the attention of political scientists and others interested in the operations of democratic government. The way in which the program was conceived, the manner in which it was administered, as well as the deliberate way in which it was abolished, throw important light on the home-front policies of the government. They also indicate the prospects for a democratic civic education program in the United States.

Origin of the Face-to-Face War Information Program. The Organizations Service Division was established in the Office of Civilian Defense by Administrative Order No. 30, dated January 4, 1943. The face-to-face war information program, which was the primary responsibility of the Organizations Service Division, had been delegated to OCD after a series of negotiations extending from June 12 to December 15, 1942, and involving the Office of War Information; Coördinator of Inter-American Affairs, OCD, Office of Education, and the Bureau of the Budget.

The development of the public power program in the Tennessee Valley area has had marked effects on inter-governmental relations, in some cases creating new relationships and in other cases modifying those already existing. Many of these relations concern coöperative activities of the T. V. A. and the state and local governments, and the results of their joint endeavors have done much to expand and improve governmental services. In its relations with the local governments, the Authority has consistently followed the policy of depending on their coöperative efforts to achieve the social and economic development of the Valley without attempting to impose its will on them. “The rôles of the states, and of cities, counties, districts, and voluntary associations within the states, are enhanced, not diminished, in importance, by this recognition of interest and jurisdiction. Coöperation, not destructive competition; Federal responsibility in Federal and interstate matters, with local initiative and self-reliance in matters of a local nature—these are policies by which the development of the Valley is being and should continue to be guided.” These principles have not always been appreciated by the local units, however, and their occasional unwillingness to assume responsibilities or to fulfil obligations to each other have presented problems that have tended to hinder the most successful conduct of the public ownership program. In fact, the readjustments in inter-governmental relations that have sometimes been necessitated, especially in connection with the power program and the resulting loss of taxes, have in some instances been accompanied by painful and significant friction.

Permanent registration for Philadelphia voters was instituted in 1937 by a state act applicable to the city exclusively. The administration of the act has been under fire almost continuously since 1938. Criticisms have emanated from the local political parties, the press, and civic organizations. Two governors have appointed investigating committees: Governor Earle in 1938 and Governor James late in 1940. The report of the latter committee was made in June, 1941. Two federal investigations were conducted during the period of the James inquiry. A federal grand jury undertook to determine whether a conspiracy to deprive persons of their right to vote in a national election existed. An abortive investigation was made by the Gillette Elections Committee of the United States Senate following charges of wholesale disfranchisement of Democratic voters.

The Philadelphia registration system is administered by a commission of five members with majority and minority representation, the commissioners being appointed by the governor with senate approval. The charges made against the Commission run the gamut from lax administration to deliberate fraud, although the latter has never been made to stick. The findings of Governor James' committee, whose investigation was the most thorough of any undertaken, show a considerable administrative failure.

Delegation of Legislative Power: To the Federal Government. The rapidly growing practice of making state agencies which administer social security laws responsible for bringing them into and keeping them in conformity with the federal Social Security Act came under review by the Washington supreme court. Immediately following adoption of the Senior Citizens Grants Act as an initiative measure in November, 1940, the federal Social Security Board began withholding the matching funds on the ground that the flat exemption of specified items of an applicant's income and resources failed to comply with the requirements of the national act. After three and a half months, the state administrators yielded to the persuasion of the Social Security Board and issued rules which in effect nullified the federally objectionable features, and at the same time detailed how the items formerly exempted were to be considered. A divided court sustained both the rules and the law. The majority concluded that the Washington law was intended to be construed in harmony with the federal act, as that act is amended and interpreted by its administrators. Accordingly, they viewed and approved the delegation chiefly as one which authorized the local administrators to declare certain portions of the act inoperative if they found them in conflict with the federal law. The situation was declared to be one in which “the Legislature enacted a statute under which the executive determines some fact or status upon the existence of which the operation of the statute is to depend.” This theory, of course, makes the function more judicial than legislative, as was pointed out in the dissenting opinion. But the theory completely ignores the fact that, after suspending the proscribed sections, the state administrators wrote their own set of definitions and rules, which were then instituted as a budgetary system.

The vacancies on the Supreme Court caused by the retirement of Mr. Justice McReynolds and Chief Justice Hughes were filled by President Roosevelt during the summer of 1941. When the Court convened in October, Mr. Justice Stone, originally appointed by President Coolidge, became Chief Justice. Chief Justice White was the only other associate justice to be promoted to the Chief Justiceship. Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, and Attorney General Robert H. Jackson of New York took their seats as associate justices. Thus seven justices have been placed on the Court by President Roosevelt. Any idea, however, that these Roosevelt appointees conform to any uniform pattern of thought is belied by the fact that in the 75 cases in the 1941 term turning on important questions of either constitutional law or federal statutory construction, there were dissents in 36, and 23 of these dissents were by either three or four justices. No act of Congress has been declared unconstitutional since May, 1936, when the Municipal Bankruptcy Act was held invalid. Since 1937, the Court has overruled 20 previous decisions, mentioning them by name, while it has modified or qualified a number of others.

The Purpose: Perspective on the Larger Aspects. The present purpose is not to examine in detail the first year of war administration, but to place some of the larger aspects of the record in such perspective as is possible at close range. Accordingly, four topics will be considered: (1) the theoretic requirements of total-war management; (2) some qualifying factors that must be taken into account in applying these theoretic requirements to appraisal of the actual administrative record; (3) observations pertinent to such appraisal; and (4) conclusion.

Managerial Requirements of Total War. Public administration is never so difficult or so crucial as in time of total war. It then becomes the appropriate function of Congress to vote the vast lump-sum appropriations, and to make the broad delegations of power that the President needs, and for the rest, to prod the Commander-in-Chief and his civil and military aides by constructive criticism and suggestion, and to act as a sounding board for public opinion back home, so as to enable executive leadership to deal intelligently with that opinion. Indeed, the latter functions must be exercised with courageous discretion, if fatal errors are not to be forced upon administrators by selfish pressure-groups or uninformed lay opinion.

The course of affairs in the second session of the Seventy-seventh Congress can best be differentiated from that of all recent years if examined with the thought that the United States is in an “all-out” war. That was how the President presented the situation to Congress on January 6 in his annual message on the state of the Union. And that was the phrase frequently used throughout the year by Representatives and Senators as an argument for or against enacting controversial bills, delegating unprecedented regulative powers, or appropriating many billions of dollars to defray governmental expenses.

On the other hand, while all of the recommendations for legislation embodied in the President's message were designed to bring the war more quickly to a close, Congress was asked by the Administration at various times during the year for the enactment of measures not related to the defense program, as the proposals to “rid Congress of trivia” and for settlement of claims of American nationals against the government of Mexico. The House and Senate, likewise, of their own accord, troubled themselves with such matters as the repeal of poll tax laws, the right of Senator Langer to his seat in the Senate, and the so-called “Congressional pension bill.”

Both House and Senate have established separate legislative and appropriations committees and operate under rules designed to exclude legislation from money bills and to deny funds for purposes which Congress has not previously approved. The authorizations generally carry a maximum limitation which allows legislative committees to exercise continuing control and gives Congress some protection against its liberality, although in the two decades between the wars military authorizations ran considerably ahead of appropriations. The appropriations committees influence policy by determining which among authorized programs are to be supported and to what extent, as well as by incorporating “legislation” in Army supply bills, supposedly only when matters are urgent. They usually consult the military affairs and other committees affected, which may offer no criticism or may complain that their jurisdictions and the will of the house concerned have been disregarded. The objection is not merely one of formalities or competition for prestige, but has solid basis in the belief that legislative committees can give more thorough consideration to the implications of new policies than can appropriations committees. Within authorizations, authority over military appropriations is diffused, but control is pretty much by the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the War Department. Its precedence over the Senate committee results, inter alia, from its initiation and more detailed examination of money measures and the latter's self-confinement largely to the rôle of an appellate agency. And the full committee, divided for purposes of expertise and expedition, usually reviews its recommendations only sketchily and hastily.