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.

During the 1943–44 term of the Supreme Court, public attention was attracted to that body on several occasions by verbal exchanges in decisions of the Court which seemed unusually sharp and personal. On January 3, 1944, Justices Black and Murphy admonished Justice Frankfurter that “for judges to rest their interpretation of statutes on nothing but their own conceptions of ‘morals’ and ‘ethics’ is, to say the least, dangerous business.” In another opinion on the same day, the same two judges referred to “what is patently a wholly gratuitous assertion as to constitutional law in the dissent of Mr. Justice Frankfurter.” In the Magnolia Petroleum Co. case, Justice Jackson observed that the minority judges were apparently willing to enforce the full faith and credit clause “only if the outcome pleases….” Justice Murphy told the Court on one occasion that it was “rewriting” a criminal statute, Justice Jackson called the decision bringing insurance under the Sherman Act a “reckless” one, and Justice Roberts several times waxed sarcastic about the disregarding or over-ruling of precedents. “This tendency,” he said, “indicates an intolerance for what those who have composed this court in the past have conscientiously and deliberately concluded, and involves an assumption that knowledge and wisdom reside in us which was denied to our predecessors.” It is not surprising that the newspapers translated these disagreements into personal terms and began to write about the “feud that was smoldering behind the Grecian columns of the white marble court building.”

There are many reasons for not taking such accounts too seriously. Thomas Reed Powell has wisely warned “laymen … not to draw too broad conclusions from any reportorial propensity to play up judicial disagreements as contests like those in war or sports.” Disagreement is no new thing on the Court. The faultless phrasing of the Holmes dissents may have raised to a higher plane, but did not conceal, differences as sharp as any evident during the past term.

On January 24, 1943, the last day of the conference at Casablanca, the President of the United States, in a press conference, referred to the sessions as the “Unconditional Surrender” Conference. The official statement on the Crimea Conference of February 11, 1945, reiterated the formula of unconditional surrender as the only one acceptable to the Allies by pointing to “the unconditional surrender terms which we shall impose together on Nazi Germany after German armed resistance has been finally crushed.” This statement gave rise to the objection that the very concept of “unconditional” obviously excludes terms of any kind. The most recent comment on the subject, in President Roosevelt's address to Congress on March 1, 1945, was apparently not intended to give a definition of “unconditional surrender,” but rather an enumeration of the policies to be followed in dealing with Germany, once “the German people, as well as the German soldier,” have given up and surrendered. Thus an official interpretation of the formula is still lacking. The following analysis attempts to clarify the meaning of unconditional surrender, and its factual and juristic-political implications.

Maintaining high-level production and employment is widely recognized today as a desirable objective of government policy. Those who oppose the government's accepting express responsibility for the achievement of this objective insist that government in a free-enterprise economy is not equipped to live up to such a responsibility. Criticism comes from two sides. Protagonists of a laissez-faire economy fear that a government pledged to assure full employment will be driven into more and more planning and regimentation. Protagonists of a planned economy, on the other hand, insist that any attempt to solve the problem of full employment within the framework of free enterprise will be futile. They fear that such an effort will only delay the transition to a planned economy, which they believe is the only final solution of our economic and social problems. Both kinds of critics maintain that the technical requirements of a policy designed to maintain full employment are incompatible with a free-enterprise economy.

What, then, are the technical requirements of a policy of full employment? Is the government equipped, or can it be equipped, to do the job without paying the price of adopting a regimented economy? Perhaps those who speak of full employment in a free-enterprise economy are driven into the same dilemma in which the oldster found himself when telling his grandchild about the alligator chasing the frog. The frog jumped from the log into the river, swam through the river, hopped on land—the alligator coming closer and closer. When the alligator finally cornered the frog under a tree and opened his mouth to swallow him, things were getting desperate for both frog and story-teller. The old man knew only one solution: “The frog looked up and Baw the tree and just as the ‘gator's jaws were closing down, the frog flew up into the tree.” “But Grandpa,” said the little boy, “frogs can't fly.” “‘Deed they cain't, Son, ‘deed they cain't,” was the answer, “but this frog flew … he had to.”

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.

The paragraphs that follow answer the same questions with respect to unconstitutional legislation by Congress that were answered with respect to unconstitutional legislation in the ten states (Colorado, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota, Illinois, Indiana, and New York) included in my study published in 1943 under the title, Unconstitutional Legislation in Ten Selected States. The congressional statutes and the decisions of the Supreme Court analyzed herein are based upon the list found in Professor Charles Grove Haines, The Doctrine of American Judicial Supremacy. The reason why this list was chosen as the basis for analysis was that it covers approximately the same period, namely, from the beginnings to the early thirties, not including the period of the New Deal which formally began in 1933. This does not mean that there is no point in analyzing the later statutes and decisions, but that for purposes of comparison it was thought safer to restrict this analysis to the same general period for both state and national materials. The three cases under No. 1 in the Haines list have been omitted because no decrees based on invalidity followed their decision.

The mere announcement of a well-thought-out foreign policy is not sufficient unless adequate machinery is available to make it effective. We have always thought of ourselves as buenos amigos to the republics south of the Rio Grande, but we have not always been able to make them believe it. Conceding that one of the reasons has been certain sins of commission, certainly another has been the sin of omission. The agencies for carrying out our foreign policies both in Washington and in the field were not geared to the load put upon them.

Even before the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the United States was keenly interested in the young sister republics to the south. However, for almost a century, the Department of State treated the world as a geographical unit in the conduct of foreign relations. It was not until 1870, when Secretary of State Hamilton Fish set up two geographical bureaus, that the second bureau was given jurisdiction over the Latin American region as well as certain other areas.

The Division of Latin American Affairs, established in 1909, is the second oldest of the geographical divisions, and its jurisdiction was limited to the twenty American Republics. When the Division was overwhelmed with work pertaining to Mexico during the latter's revolutionary period, a Division of Mexican Affairs was established in 1915, and it remained in existence until 1937, when the new Division of the American Republics was established and given jurisdiction over relations with all twenty American Republics. This arrangement lasted until the reorganization of January, 1944, when the Office of American Republic Affairs was established and subdivided at first into six, and later five, divisions upon a regional basis. Another division, named the Division of American Republic Analysis and Liaison, was added by Departmental Order No. 1271, dated May 3, 1944.

Toward the close of the San Francisco Conference, Czechoslovakia's Jan Masaryk remarked that his feeling toward the new Charter “was much like that of the father fondly awaiting the birth of a son. The baby finally arrives and it turns out to be a girl. At first the father is somewhat disappointed, but he soon learns to like her just the same.” While the delegates as a whole believed that their work would go down in history as one of the great documents of all times, many no doubt shared Masaryk's view. For when a document as comprehensive as the Charter is framed, no one gets exactly what he wants.

The article of the Charter that raised the most controversy at San Francisco and the article that epitomizes the nature of the Organization, perhaps more than any other, is the Yalta formula for voting in the Security Council. So heated did the debate on this issue become that Room 223 in the Veterans Building, where the meetings of Committee III/l were held, was dubbed the “Madison Square Garden” of San Francisco. The frankness and candor with which the delegates exchanged views constitutes, in many respects, a good example of international democracy in action.

It is the purpose of this paper to review the action taken at San Francisco with respect to the Yalta voting formula and to point out the relationship of that formula to the special position of the great powers in the new Organization.

The Administration's legislative program for 1944 was presented to Congress in the 1945 budget message and the state of the Union message. Subsequently, drafted bills from heads of departments, administrative agencies, and even the chief executive, were submitted for Congressional approval. But they either embodied or supplemented proposals contained in one of the two messages, or were of an incidental nature.

The state of the Union message set forth a five-point program, recommending that Congress adopt: (1) a realistic tax law, (2) a continuation of the law for the renegotiation of war contracts, (3) a cost-of-food law, (4) an early reënactment of the stabilization statute of October, 1942, and (5) a national service law. Having listed these proposals, the President concluded: “These five measures together form a just and equitable whole. I would not recommend a national service law unless the other laws were passed to keep down the cost of living, to share equitably the burdens of taxation, to hold the stabilization line, and to prevent undue profits.”

The United Kingdom has gone considerably farther than the United States in the acceptance of full employment as one of the prime aims of government policy. There is a widespread feeling that it may also have gone farther in devising governmental machinery for the realization of this aim. On both counts—the end and the means—the present trend in the United Kingdom merits attention in the United States and other countries.

Official endorsement of full employment as a proper end for governmental policy dates back to 1944. The much-quoted white paper on Employment Policy was presented to Parliament by Lord Woolton, Minister of Reconstruction in the Churchill coalition, a few days before D-day. It began with the unequivocal statement: “The Government accept as one of their primary aims and responsibilities the maintenance of a high and stable level of employment after the war.” Shortly afterwards, at the conclusion of a three-day debate, the House of Commons passed a resolution moved by Laborite Ernest Bevin, then Minister of Labor and National Service, and supported on the side of the Conservatives by Sir John Anderson as Chancellor of the Exchequer: “That this House … welcomes the declaration of His Majesty's Government….” At no time later has this basic commitment been placed in doubt.

Acceptance of full employment in business circles might be illustrated by a number of authoritative pronouncements made in the middle of the war. These include a pamphlet entitled The Problem of Unemployment, issued by Lever Brothers and Unilever Limited at the beginning of 1943. Here it was clearly argued that irregularity of capital investment was the principal cause of unemployment; that the profit motive had proved an insufficient guide in the extension of productive capacity; and that it was the task of government to regularize the incentive to investment by the use of indirect controls.

Many accusations are being made in England at the present time that an over-centralized bureaucracy is stifling local government. The Government's plans for local government in the postwar period tend, it is said, to abolish local self-government.

If any such trends are discernible, an examination of local-government developments in 1944 ought to reveal them, since that year was one of profound change for English local government. Nearly every service administered by local government was in some way affected. Some services were enlarged, others reduced. New services were added, old ones dropped. Central-local relations in the performance of these functions were in nearly every case altered. Even the relations between different units of local government were modified.

In the pages that follow, an attempt is made to summarize some of the most important changes made in 1944 in the services performed by local units and to indicate some of the trends which are manifest when the changes are viewed as a whole.

A new constitution will be submitted to the voters of Missouri at a special election on February 27, 1945. It was drafted by a bi-partisan convention which met on September 21, 1943, and adjourned sine die on September 29, 1944, after spending 215 days in session. The convention was authorized by the voters, under the twenty-year rule, in November, 1943, and 68 senatorial district delegates and 15 delegates-at-large were elected in April, 1943. One of the latter, an anti-New Deal Democrat, was agreed upon by the state committees of both major parties, and later became president of the convention.

The great majority of delegates were conservative, but constructive in their attitude. They expressed confidence in the voters and in local self-government, and insisted on definitely checking all public officials and agencies. In general, the more liberal delegates were older men, with long and distinguished records of public service and without further political aspirations; the more conservative delegates were generally younger men, with less political experience. A bare majority were lawyers. The others represented some twenty different business and professional groups, including four college professors and two women.

A plan for the peaceful settlement of international disputes is the very heart of any charter establishing an international organization to maintain peace and security. Greater emphasis may be given and greater popular interest may attach, particularly in time of war, to provisions for the joint use of national economic and military forces in restraint of aggression. Yet it must be admitted that peace and security are most completely assured when the necessity for resort to collective force does not exist, and when nations, like individuals in a well-ordered society, settle their differences by peaceful means.

Any full understanding of the provisions for the pacific settlement of disputes contained in the Charter of the United Nations would, of course, require an analysis of our total historical experience in the development of principles, procedures, and institutions for this purpose. In particular, an analysis of the League system and its actual operation, and of the reasons why it failed, would seem necessary. For whatever we do today must find its chief justification in the conviction that in our present endeavor we are profiting from the experience of the past and are creating a system which has a better chance of success than its predecessors. Space, however, does not permit the detailed analysis of our historical experience which is necessary to a satisfactory evaluation of the San Francisco achievement. The reader who wishes to explore this historical background more fully is referred to the extensive literature dealing generally with peaceful settlement of disputes, and more particularly with the League experience.

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.

The prediction that full employment will have a great political future is based on the fact that economic policies of this kind reach large segments of the public not previously accustomed to political action or only recently made aware of the potentialities of politics. Only the war itself has served to remind these relatively non-political people as urgently of the new importance of the government to every one as they are likely to be reminded by the establishment of the principle that public authority and public resources ought to be used to promote or produce sixty million jobs. What people do about the government depends on what they think the government is able to do. Therefore, the idea that the government is now able to protect people against the most dreaded of the manifestations of economic instability is almost certain to have a great impact on the political behavior of millions of people, many of whom have never before been drawn into the orbit of politics.

Moreover, unless the millenium is here, it seems probable that a prolonged and disturbing controversy over employment policies is in the making. In fact, a major political conflict over these policies can probably be avoided only by the abandonment of the whole project, i.e., by conceding the argument that full employment is none of the business of the government. The friends of the new policies are, therefore, in the position of having to pray for stormy weather.

For more than half a century, the states of the Western hemisphere have coöperated for the promotion of their mutual interests by means of a loose form of organization which is unique in the categories of political science. Step by step, the organization has proclaimed its principles and strengthened the machinery of its conferences and its consultative meetings of Foreign Ministers; step by step it has enlarged its functions and developed new agencies for their administration. But at no time have the American states sought to draw up a formal charter defining the status of their collective membership as constituting a corporate international person. Rather they have preferred to coöperate along practical lines and to develop their organization progressively as the circumstances of the time appeared to demand. In consequence, while the inter-American system exists as a fact, while it functions as an association or “union” of twentyone American states, its precise juridical character as a regional organization has never been defined. Whether the establishment of the new international organization contemplated by the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals will call for such a definition, in order to establish more accurately the relations between the two systems, is a question for speculation, now that the Conference at Mexico City is in progress.

The Security Council of the United Nations will, from the first day of its existence, include in its membership all of the great powers. The Council, backed by the united will of the five powers with permanent seats in that body, will act, if it acts at all, with an authority which no organ of the League of Nations ever possessed. In the League Council, there was no time during which all of the great powers participated. Only two of them, France and the United Kingdom, were League members throughout its period of activity. Some may believe that too high a price, or a higher price than was necessary, was paid to insure the participation of the Five Powers, and especially the United States and the Soviet Union, in the United Nations Organization. The price was paid largely in provisions of its Charter relative to the maintenance or restoration of international peace and security which circumscribe carefully the situations in which the Security Council can take action.

An important innovation in the method of filling elective offices in multiple-member districts, applicable to the federal, state, and local governments alike, was inaugurated in Oregon in 1893 by an act providing that the several judges of the circuit court for Multnomah county should be elected by “departments,” consecutively numbered. Similar action was taken in the casé of the district court for Multnomah county in 1913. Likewise, an act of 1929 provides that the offices of the seven judges of the supreme court shall constitute seven “positions” and be so indicated on the ballot. The charter of the city of Portland was amended in 1934 to apply the “position” principle to the four city commissioners. Next, the three circuit judges of the second district became elective by “positions” in 1935, and so, in 1941, did the two circuit judges of Linn county. At the 1941 session of the legislature, a futile attempt was made to do the same thing for the thirteen members of the state house of representatives from Multnomah county.

When the voters of any district are limited to the selection of a single officer, the “short ballot” simplifies the voters' task in choosing from among candidates at the election, prevents the “single-shotting” more or less prevalent in multiple districts, and discourages small pluralities. But in reducing these difficulties, it at the same time promotes others. In case of any office, the narrow range of choice is likely to reduce the quality of the officers. When the office is legislative, the incumbent is likely to be “district-minded” and “machine-controlled,” and so to neglect the general interests for those of the district or those of the local politicians. Such considerations were urged in favor of the compromise involved in the “position” method employed for the Portland commissioners and the representatives from Multnomah county; and they are, of course, applicable, in a degree, to the judges.

Does the concept of sovereignty under law necessarily involve a self-contradiction? That it does, has admittedly been held by the great majority of careful thinkers from the time of Hobbes to the present day. Nor has this been inconsequential. The belief that submission to an enforceable law would be a surrender of sovereignty has been a most potent obstacle to the substitution of the law court for the battlefield in the determination of international disputes. On the other hand, it is generally conceded that for the individual the only liberty worth seeking is liberty under law. It is the thesis of this article that sovereignty under law for the state is no more absurd than liberty under law for the individual.

The term “sovereignty” has been variously and elaborately defined, but for present purposes its essential elements may be listed as authority, equality, and liberty. The first-named attribute—authority—has its great importance in the field of constitutional law, which postulates that in every state there is some agency or combination of agencies possessed of the authority to control everything within the state. However, it is well known that the rise and spread of constitutionalism and federalism have rendered the concept of sovereign authority increasingly mystical. Even in Great Britain, the old simplicity of the sovereignty of “King in Parliament” has been complicated by the Parliament Act of 1911, and especially by the Statute of Westminster of 1931. To-be sure, it is easy enough to visualize sovereign authority in a dictatorial régime, but this arouses no envy on the part of those who enjoy other forms of government.

Latin America's part and problems in the international order that is now emerging have not taken final shape at the present writing (March, 1945), and may not do so for some time after the United Nations Conference scheduled to open at San Francisco on April 25. Nevertheless, most of the main outlines seem to have been sketched in by recent developments, notably by the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals of October, 1944, and two subsequent conferences: the Great-Power conference held at Yalta in February of this year, and the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace (commonly called the Chapultepec Conference) held at Mexico City in February and March.

I

The Dumbarton Oaks Proposals, although neither complete nor definitive, did give an official and rather detailed picture of the kind of general international organization the Great Powers were planning to establish. From the point of view of this paper, the two principal features of the plan were (1) that it established a pattern of Great Power ascendancy in the general organization, particularly with reference to its central organ, the Security Council, and (2) that it encouraged the development of regional arrangements and agencies, such as the inter-American system, within the framework of the general organization (Proposals, Chap. VIII, Sec. C). The former feature was reinforced by the Yalta Conference, the latter by the Chapultepec Conference, which was devoted primarily to the task of strengthening the inter-American system and adapting it to the projected general organization outlined by the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals.