Political earthquake weather

JAY FRANKLIN

A foreboding that America is on the eve of a change that will alter its aspects politically and in everyway affect its basic principles

A curious calm has settled upon the political landscape. A sense of impending upheaval —the feeling that something is about to happen—conveys an uneasy mood to the Administration and to international politics. Everyone who is endowed to any degree with the barometric sense, with the ability to detect changes in the political atmosphere, is aware that the entire Washington scene has become surcharged with ominous forebodings.

The members of the Republican National Committee slink restlessly about the White House, snuff under the door, and whimper and jerk in their sleep. Old Senator Fess gets up, paddles over to the Executive mansion and lays his head on the Administration's knee, looking deeply troubled and whining, as though he were trying to say something. Down in the Augean Stables of party politics, the political wheel-horses are stamping and whinnying, while Senator Moses casts back his head, points his nose at the election returns, and howls. Although it is two long years before the dawn of 1932, the Democrats are crowing for the sunrise and their party press is clucking vigorously. Little gusts of irrelevant emotion whip up the dust, rustle the withered ballots, and die down. Above the hills, the thunder-heads of unemployment and depression bank up the roll forward, blotting out the familiar Constitutional stars.

It is so silent that you can hear a politician change his opinion. Out in the Rocky Mountains the wild cattle of the hills are bellowing uneasily. Borah roars mournfully in the canyons and Norris answers him lugubriously across the desolate prairies. There are strange rustlings in the political undergrowth as the booze-constrictors of the Anti-Saloon League, driven from their holes by some strange instinct, seek new bedfellows. Ominous rumblings and cracklings underground betoken the breaking-up of parties. A constant flicker of riots accompanies the storm-clouds, showing the swinging truncheons of the police and the clanging patrol-wagons freighted with white-faced prisoners.

The Eastern sea roars on the barrier-reef of American foreign policy, with an alarming crescendo. Those combers sound as though they were in the house. The World Court— Disarmament — Consultative Pact — German Moratorium—Debt Revision: the sullen waves lift themselves and break in successive thunders, dragging and sucking at the little ships at anchor in the harbor. Far to the east the great volcano of Moscow pales and glows against the horizon, throwing a ghastly red light over the world, while the watchers in the west can see the lava-kindled fires still blazing on the Chinese uplands and flickering in the parched plains of India. To the south rumbles the great storm which has flattened whole plantations of political bananas and has blown away the Presidents of half a dozen Latin republics.

In the White House, the single kerosene lamp burns steadily enough, but the occupants are uneasy. It is earthquake weather and until the quake has passed there can be no peace of mind or body. The first shock in November loosened a little plaster in the walls and toppled over a few pictures, but it is obvious that the real thing has not come yet. When it comes, will it be a series of little shocks, strong enough to do some damage, but nothing like a catastrophe? Will the Communist volcano cast its lava and its scoriae upon our fields, laying them waste beneath the hot ashes of dead institutions and a shower of white-hot Marxian dogmatism? Will the eastward sea lift itself up in a tidal wave of European politics, sweeping away our landmarks, submerging our policies, and extinguishing the lights which guide our mariners safely back to port? Will it be one violent and catastrophic shock like that which engulfed Lisbon two centuries ago, in which the earth will gape beneath us while the storm of economic destruction bursts over our heads? Or will it be a short, freakish political cyclone, like that which unhoused our southern neighbors, Leguia, Siles, Irigoyen and Luiz, in Peru, Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil?

• Whatever it is and however it comes, the sense that something strange is about to happen is the only reality in the present political situation. Many of us thought that it was only the elections, but the elections have come and gone, and the queer tension of the political atmosphere remains unchanged. Others have said that it would be a new world war, but wars are begotten not made, and the wicked Old World has not recovered from her last confinement. Still others believe that it is world-revolution that impends, but the ten relentless years of Russian misery and bloodshed, despite the extraordinary achievements of the Soviets in certain lines, constitute an object lesson which makes a world-wide proletarian movement less than plausible. Whatever it is, it seems certain that it is to be international as well as domestic, and that it will be economic as well as political.

To shift metaphors abruptly, and to mix them beyond repair, the Ship of State has lost headway in the mist. One by one our major foreign and domestic policies have run down. We do not seem to have enough of a head of steam to do more than blow the whistle, and the thud of the bursting fogsignals on the bridge is the only auricular evidence that there is anyone left in command of our drifting vessel. Detachment from Europe is breaking down into League conferences, pleas for disarmament, the World Court and consultative pacts. Through the fog we can hear the echoes of our signals cast back by the great berg of German default, much nearer to us than we had thought. The Monroe Doctrine does not answer the helm very well, as friend and foe in the Latin Republics go down without a struggle, as a South American trade war with England looms up on the horizon, and as our prestige is compromised by diplomatic support of one doomed autocratic regime after another. In Asia the Open Door has lost its hinges, as the fire engines roar to the rescue of an entire civilization in flames. Our anathema of Russian lack of economic orthodoxy has singularly failed to interfere with the gargantuan -projects of the Communist rulers of Moscow, while the precise and legalistic warnings of our diplomats have not put a perceptible crimp in the Red racket.

At home, the new Tariff has been a failure. It satisfied no one at the time and, as an explanation of our economic welfare, it is about as satisfactory as the argument that your wife's wrist-watch must be fast when you come home at three o'clock in the morning, reeking of gin and good-humor. Prosperity did not come back with the song that happy days were here again. Farm Relief didn't prevent the price of wheat from sliding down the economic bannisters. To most of us, the Stock Exchange is just one damned quotation lower than another. Crime is in the saddle in a dozen cities, and Prohibition has jammed the ponderous thrust and heave of the political pistons in the Constitutional cylinder-head.

At home and abroad, the Administration is hanging on a dead-center. The liquorsham commission is wet on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, dry on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and is out of town on Sundays and holidays. Congress is to be Republican or Democratic, depending on the obituary notices and the Farmer-Labor Party. The Democrats will cooperate with the President one week; the next week, they are going to force an extra session. A month before election, Mr. Mellon thinks that the Treasury can retain the tax-cut enacted in 1929 for the benefit of the parched victims of the Wall Street drought; a month after elections, income taxes are going to be raised to prevent a Treasury deficit. It is all wrong for the Russian Government to sell wheat; it is all right for the United States Government to sell wheat. At one time we are going to keep out Russian goods; at another we are going to let them in. We are going to join the World Court, or perhaps we will not, after all. We have got our fingers crossed, our legs crossed and our wires crossed, and whichever way the cat jumps, we will be hot after it in triumphant pursuit.

Indecision and obscurantism are the Alpha and Omega of our present policy. We are not doing anything, either because we frankly don't know what to do, which is commonsense; or because what we ought to do is contrary to the Republican text-books, which is common politics. We do not believe anything which runs against our wishes, either because to do so might alarm the public or because we have been taught to believe that Coué and not Barnum was right.

Once before in our recent political history have we known such a mood as this, in the Taft Administration. In one of the more affecting passages in Archie Butt's indiscreet letters from the White House, twenty years ago, he reports Taft as bewailing the pigmy age he lived in. The political giants had departed, the tumult and the shouting was stilled. Disraeli and Gladstone, Bismarck and Cavour, were sleeping. Hanna and Hay no longer ruled at Washington, not even in spirit. Roosevelt was in Africa. Hoover was still a rising London mining engineer. Wilson was only an unpopular President of Princeton University. Harding was an ambitious young Ohio politician and Governor Hughes of New York was regarded by everyone in the know as the White Hope of the Republican Party. It was a small age and Taft reluctantly recognized it as an interlude, necessary perhaps for the historical scene-shifters but tedious for the actors and the audience. Taft spoke of these things and he wondered—wondered—wondered—

Two years later the Republican Party was split and lay in ruins at the feet of Taft and Roosevelt, while Woodrow Wilson was entering upon the eight momentous years of world politics. Four years later, Europe flamed up in the World War, convulsing the politics and the economics of the entire globe for a generation. Seven years after Taft spoke, the Russian Revolution came, and those "ten days that shook the world" and which are still shaking it. Ten years after Taft wondered, the United States had won naval parity from the British Empire and was holding the purse-strings for humanity.

It is the haunting sense of the imminence of such sweeping events as these, which is responsible for the sickly mood of political society at Washington. We are obviously at the beginning of a new era, to replace the age which died in 1920. World history and world power is to be made all over again in the next twenty years. The steady beat of our political life goes in ten and twenty-year rhythms. Twenty years of achievement, ten years of transition; systole, diastole; the ticking of the clock. The age of Washington and Hamilton came and passed between the end of the Revolution and the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. Transition: a decade of Jeffersonian "democracy", followed by a generation (1810-1830) of war and of government by gentlemen. Transition again: a decade of Jacksonian "democracy", of government of roughnecks, then again the generation of achievement, the steamboat days of the Old South and the era of Southern rule at Washington, war with Mexico and all the rest of it. Change scenes again: a decade of Lincoln and of revolution, and then another generation, 1870-1890, lived out its appointed time, in a common mould. Another short decade of change, from 1890 to 1900, made us a world power and witnessed the end of the era which closed with the Spanish-American War, and the assassination of McKinley. Twenty more years, a whole generation, the age of Roosevelt and Wilson (with Taft as an entr'acte), and we lived to a quicker tempo, achieved greatly. Then we reverted to a synthetic McKinley in the person of Harding and a mock McKinley era in the decade of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, with its emphasis on normalcy, the full radioset, and prosperity on the GrecoRoman or catch-as-catch-can style. The men, who ruled us during the deadly decade, came of age in the years 1880-1890. Their ideas dated. That was an era which held that all was well with the world.

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A new age is beginning and our rulers, most of whom came to manhood when the Bloody Shirt and the Torch-Light Parade were the adjuncts of political enthusiasm, view the coming era with dubiety, and without enthusiasm or hope.

That is the political menace of this international earthquake weather. Whether the White House walls hold up under the shock is immaterial. We now realize that the place is a little rickety and old-fashioned and that it's time we had a modern quake-proof establishment. We know that, whether the tidal wave sweeps over the jetty, it is time we replaced the jetty with a good breakwater. Whether or not the unemployment crisis drops a political thunderbolt on Congress, we know that we ought to take out insurance against the economic lightning and we realize that we have been a little hasty in building a complete credit system on the rickety foundations of German Reparations and War Debts and that it was not perhaps altogether wise to rule the Russians out of our commercial calculations.

New times, new men, new measures, new methods, new policies, new philosophies are on the way. Until we know who and what they are to be, the atmosphere of uneasiness and of impending change will continue to give an air of unreality and insignificance to the public statements and political manoeuvers at Washington. Something is about to happen. It will happen at its own time and in its own way. For the first time in a decade we are in the grip of political forces which are bigger and stronger than any man, any party or any nation. When they have had their way with us, we can sit back and start asking each other what happened. Now we can only wait and wonder whether the quake will shake us up a bit or whether it will wreck us completely.