As we are moving into the terminal phase of World War II, it is inevitable—and entirely proper—that we allow our thoughts to wander ahead in an initial exploration of the matters on our national postwar agenda. Many of these matters relate to ends and center on policy alternatives. Others focus primarily on means and involve questions of approach. The latter include problems of governmental structure and machinery within the framework of our political system. Such problems present themselves in both the legislative and executive departments. With respect to the executive branch, we must seek to evolve an appropriate organizational form that will enable the federal government to sustain effectively an economy of high-level production and employment. In this effort we are confronted in part with a task of constructive innovation, in part with the need for reëxamination of prewar working hypotheses and wartime experience. It would be a promising venture to return to the work of the President's Committee on Administrative Management and appraise its proposals in the light of later developments. In any such enterprise, attention must doubtless be given to one conception closely associated with the recommendations of the President's Committee: that of the Executive Office of the President.

For courts of forty-eight states to interpret forty-nine detailed organic acts with an eye toward maintaining limited federal government amid centralizing total war and a distracting national election, challenges not only the statesmanship of performers, but the discrimination of reviewers.

Collectively, the major state court decisions in the third year of the war point toward a resurgence of judicial power, a reëmphasis upon the rights and the place of the states and upon the legislative as opposed to the executive branch, a new period of exceptional interest and fertility in the growth of constitutional doctrine.

War, paradoxically, has bolstered as well as undermined the creed of states' rights. The pattern that has emerged from the small but growing number of federalism cases reveals state courts no longer content to make a virtue of necessity. “Little OPA” acts and ordinances are generally upheld. But expanded federal controls exercised administratively in fields long reserved to the states meet steadily mounting opposition—especially if they are not obviously crucial to the war effort or to the stability of a war economy. Even actions taken under those provisions of the Price Control Act which were deliberately framed to safeguard federal administrators from state-court interference have suffered nullification. Since the date of the Yakus and Willingham decisions, statutory construction has supplanted constitutional law as the medium for resolving those personal and delicate questions of the state judges' own powers under the Price Control act.

One of the most controversial legislative matters considered by the Seventy-eighth Congress was the question of whether or not Congress should simplify voting procedures for service men and women. The popular feeling of the nation strongly favored giving the armed forces every opportunity to vote, not inconsistent with the necessities of war. The controversy in Congress was not restricted entirely to the constitutional question of whether or not Congress had the legal power to provide soldiers with a federal ballot by which they could vote for president, vice-president, representatives, and senators, but in addition, it raised social and political questions of great magnitude. The political significance of the service vote became increasingly apparent when the Gallup Poll announced on December 4, 1943, that the soldier vote, which favored President Franklin D. Roosevelt by 61 per cent, could break the apparent even division of the electorate between the two parties and assure Roosevelt of reëlection. The social significance of liberal federal legislation on the issue was obvious, since numerous states have suffrage laws to prevent the practice of universal suffrage.

For many years it has been apparent to the most casual observer that relatively few candidates for county office appear in the Iowa primaries. Very frequently indeed, only one aspirant for nomination will have his name on a party ballot as a candidate for a given office; and often there will be no candidate at all on the other party ballot for that office. This means, of course, in the first case that there is no contest whatever in the primary; and in the second case that there is no contest either in the primary or in the general election which follows. In other words, the lone candidate gains office merely by filing nomination papers. It is the purpose of the present article to present the essential facts with respect to the Iowa primary of June 5, 1944, and to venture some comments as to their implications. Only county offices will be considered.

One of the principal recommendations contained in the recent report of the Research Committee of the American Political Science Association was that mature scholars “be influenced as to the subjects selected for research by the findings of research panels and committees.” Acceptance of this general recommendation may be facilitated by the tenor of the findings and suggestions of two research committees of the Social Science Research Council—the Committee on Government and the Committee on Public Administration. The report of the former committee, based upon three years of exploration of research areas, was published in October, 1944. The report of the Public Administration Committee will presently be published by the Public Administration Service under the title “Research in Public Administration, 1934–1945,” along with a report prepared by Professor John M. Gaus surveying general research developments in the area since 1930. Although essentially a review of major accomplishments and past activities, the report of the Public Administration Committee nevertheless outlines a research program of enduring and continuing interest. The scope and nature of the research proposals advanced by both committees are the subject of this brief review.

In the United States, the academic study of political thought and institutions for nearly two generations has been carried on in a quiet and often sequestered college atmosphere. Departments of political science, having achieved their independence from history or philosophy or from faculties of law, have freely pursued their interests and attracted satisfactorily large groups of students. Political scientists in the past have often been very effective as reformers and sometimes have served as lawmakers and administrators. Our profession has, however, been essentially a product of the humanistic and philosophic tradition of the liberal arts college. Our occasional forays into politics or administration have been treated rather as personal adventures than as habitual to the career of a student of government. As professors of a distinctive discipline, we have taught our courses and expected of our colleagues in other departments that respect for jurisdictional boundaries which serves as the greatest safeguard to our scholarly mysteries and the readiest protection of academic amenities. Changes are already upon us that promise to alter greatly these familiar and pleasant arrangements.

During the next ten years, the profession of political science will be facing conditions that promise to affect profoundly the nature of this discipline. These conditioning factors are (1) the relatively greater rôle that government has assumed and (2) the more active part that students of government are undertaking in public affairs. With these two factors as my premise, I shall discuss their implications for political science as a distinctive field of study.