A Gallup Poll taken at May's end showed that the U. S. was divided half for, half against conscription. Last week another poll showed two-thirds of the U. S. people (67%) favored conscription. But also last week this majority seemed about to be defeated.
Up in Congress was the Burke-Wads-worth Selective Training and Service Bill. By the simpler concepts of democracy, the bill should have rolled through Congress, garnering applause from its supporters. The opposite happened. The bill was stalled, hacked to the point of emasculation. Minority pressure was, for the moment at least, triumphant. This was neither new nor even out of the ordinary. What was extraordinary last week was the great, mal-assorted conglomeration of minorities against conscription; the extreme inaction of the thwarted majority, the silence or ineptitude of most of its supposed spokesmen, the misinformation or lack of information which was permitted to imperil the majority will.
Hash From Home. Citizens wondering how the majority could be thus dillied, did well to look toward La Salle and Ran dolph Streets in Chicago. At that busy corner, one day last week, a white horse stood. On the horse was Miss Elane Summers, 19, a Rockford (Ill.) College sophomore, in a Revolutionary getup which was supposed to make her resemble Paul Revere (see cut,p.11). Calling herself Pauline Revere, Miss Summers admonished the U. S.: "MOBILIZE FOR PEACE—DEFEAT CONSCRIPTION." Said alliterative Papa Summers (who in 1938 denounced Communists for luring his son Thane to death in Loyalist Spain): ". . . My pink daughter ... [on] a white horse ... a pretty puppet is paraded to propagandize against American preparedness . . . [by] Stalin's subtle stooges."
Symbolized by this puppet Pauline was the bulk of last week's "popular" opposition to conscription. Among the articulate minorities which frightened Congress were many sincere, substantial, respected groups. But in sum they made as weird a hash as was ever dumped on Washington:
¶There was first a noble front of such eminent moralists as Norman Thomas, oldtime Pacifist Oswald Garrison Villard and Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, who is full of guilty feelings about the last war.
¶Labor in the person of C. I. O.'s John Lewis identified conscription with dictatorship ("Democracy must offer its own way of life to combat the forces which imperil civilization today"). Caught between his instinct to oppose John Lewis and his aversion to any politically uncertain controversy. A. F. of L.'s William Green hesitated, finally came out against compulsory training until it becomes "necessary to defend, protect and preserve America."
¶The Communist Party was of course against U. S. conscription. So, naturally enough, was the American Youth Congress, whose loud lobbyists visited Capitol Hill in mass. A. Y. C.'s most potent friend is Eleanor Roosevelt, who surprised readers of her column last month by gently slapping her young chums' wrists for not facing "the world as it is today." Last week, she changed tune, did no favor to her husband by writing in "My Day": "The general feeling I encounter is that we should remain, where military service is concerned, on a voluntary basis."