The
Manchester Guardian, January 23rd 1935
UNITED STATES UNDER ROOSEVELT
(First Article)
Welding a Nation
A REVOLUTION
Federal Government’s Growing Power
By
Gareth Jones.
[Mr. Gareth Jones, who has been making a tour of inquiry through the United
States on his way to the Far East, here gives his impressions of the “national
revolution” in progress in the United States. In a further article he
will discuss the limits and the extent of Mr. Roosevelt’s popularity.]
LOS ANGELES,
JANUARY.
The traveller
who after two and a half years’ absence steams into New York and crosses
America from the east to the Pacific feels that in the Roosevelt era the United
States is undergoing a revolution in the national sense. A continent is
becoming a nation, and the binding forces of the Civil War of 1861 to 1865,
which put an end to the threats of secession and disintegration, are being
continued in the present phase of national unification.
To the traveller
who is accustomed to the American’s clinging to State rights, to his hatred of
interference from Washington, to his fear of yielding too much power to the
President, to his feeling of the independence of the local community, a journey
along the east coast from New Hampshire down to the Southern State of Virginia,
in the Middle Western States of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana, and in the
Western States of New Mexico and California brings a revelation of this profound
change in the American attitude towards government and towards the nation, and
indeed in the whole American character.
Three years ago
there still ruled a deep suspicion of the Federal power, a determination that no
bureaucrats a thousand or more miles away should interfere with the traditional
rights of the Southerner or the Westerner or the Middle Westerner, a stress upon
the privileges of the local government which was rooted in the
eighteenth-century colonist’s loathing of the dictates of a Government in
London across the ocean, and a stubborn faith in the sanctity of the motives of
the private business man as opposed to the iniquity of the politician.
These motives still dominate the thinking of the majority of American business
men, but they have yielded in the general mass of the people to a dependence
upon the Federal Government, a change which is resulting in the trampling down
of many of the rights of the States and in the creating of a government form
which is more apparent in federated America.
Everywhere the
Federal power is extending its network of influence, and Washington is at last a
capital, instead of being a meeting-place of the representatives and senators
from the states; its grip over activities in California, 3,000 miles away, is a
symbol of the national revolution through which the United States is going.
“G MEN”
Even Chicago and
Illinois must now bow low before the all-powerful centralists of Washington and
must abandon certain privileges - often very profitable privileges to grafters -
of self-government to the inrush of Federal forces. In Chicago the police
are smarting under the invasion of the Federal police, who at last are battling
successfully against the gangsters and are now undertaking a Federal campaign
against kidnappers. In droves these “G men” (Government men), as they
are called, descended from Washington into the sacred preserves of the City and
State police and by cleaning up Chicago more thoroughly and rapidly than had
ever before been done demonstrated the superiority of Federal police power over
the corrupt local forces. This Federal drive against crime, which had its
initial impulse in the Lindbergh kidnapping of March, 1932, shows that Colonel
Lindbergh will have played a part not only in linking Europe with the United
States but also in helping to create by the fate of his child a greater American
national Unity in the breaking down of State harriers which have in the past so
handicapped the arrest of criminals.
Many
conservative Americans would three years ago have been almost shocked by another
feature of Federal interference - namely, Federal relief - as they were by
gangsterdom. Business men would have thrown up their arms at the mention
of such a “radical” measure as the spending of Federal funds for what they
considered the task of the local community. To-day, however, Federal
agencies are shouldering more than two-thirds of the total cost of relief, while
some of the States have almost left the financing of relief work to Washington.
PUBLIC WORKS
The vast public
works, such as the Boulder Dam on the Colorado River and the Tennessee Valley
schemes, which will provide electric power extending over a number of States,
are another example of the increase in the functions of the Federal Government.
The financing not only of these works but of private banking and private
industries is being concentrated more and more in Washington, where the
profusion of lending agencies with names that grow ever more complicated is
bewildering to the visiting observer. A financial network thus links the
States closer to the central Government, a move which is symbolised by a
skyscraper bank in Chicago topped by a statue of Ceres. Two-thirds of the
stock of this bank is owned by the Government organisation the Reconstruction
Finance Corporation, and other bankers realise that when dealing with this bank
they are dealing with the Government.
This rapid
centralisation cannot be carried out, however, without abandoning another basis
of American political feeling - the dread lest a President should exceed his
rights, and the desire that Congress should clip the President’s wings if he
should dare to go beyond his powers. Backed by the election of November 6
President Roosevelt has a whip-hand over the Congress, which will enable him to
consolidate the forces of the nation and to lessen those State rights which are
often obstacles to his policy.
The movement
towards a united nation is speeded up by the crash of the leaderless Republican
party, which will take many years to recover, and by the virtual introduction of
the one-party system. No longer is the “Democratic” South
opposed to the “Republican” North, for one party with allegiance to a
central organisation dominates nearly all the country.
MORIBUND “STATE RIGHTS”
The, unification
of the United States is not without its bitter opponents. “Why should
Washington tell me what I should do in Illinois?” a Chicago Republican
business man will declare with scorn. “What do the professors of the
Brain Trust know about pigs in the Chicago stockyard? What right has the
Federal Government to order people in my State to sell at such and such a price?
It is smashing the Constitution.” Representative Wadsworth, a
Republican, speaking in curiously Jeffersonian phrases, states that the new
programme of President Roosevelt “seeks the abandonment of the American
conception of liberty under a Constitution, puts the Federal Government in the
possession of complete authority over those matters which the Tenth Amendment
reserves to the States and the people, and spells the end of the Federal
Union.” In the South, like a voice from out of the nineteenth century,
Governor Huey Long demands that the State of Louisiana should have the right to
secede from the Union.
But these appear
to be the dying groans of the defenders of State of rights, for they have
opposed to them those material inventions which are no respecters of the States.
Motor-cars which cross State frontiers at 75 miles an hour, streamlined trains
which speed across the continent, telephone calls across 3,000 miles from San
Francisco to New York which can be in put through in two or three minutes,
national “hook-ups” on the radio, and the reduction of the transcontinental
flight by air to twelve hours - them are all unifying factors. Moreover,
each year sees the death of old immigrants who cannot speak English and the
emergence from schools of their Americanised children and grandchildren, and
since immigration has been ruthlessly cut down there is less infiltration of
foreign stock.
The traveller,
therefore, when he arrives at the Pacific coast, concludes that under President
Roosevelt a national revolution is in progress and that the United States is at
last becoming a “United State.”
|
Dollar, Yo-Yo.
|
