No nation has ever fought a tough war without overriding for the duration some of the civil liberties of its people. The war we are fighting is more than a tough war; it is a mortal struggle in which the life of constitutional democracy throughout the world is at stake. It presents a new kind of challenge to the vitality of American civil liberty. We know from grim experience that in the peace which follows a tough war, civil liberty faces new and increased dangers. High-keyed energies and emotions, suddenly released, seek a new outlet. Wartime patriotism tends to become peacetime intolerance, and wherever there is intolerance, the traditional civil liberties of unpopular minority groups are in grave danger of being brutally suppressed. The peace which will follow the war we are now fighting will be without precedent in the complexity of its problems, the power of the emotional reactions which it will generate, and the strength of the triumphant determination of our people to preserve intact the fruits of victory. This peace will bring in its wake an unprecedented temptation to abridge some of our basic civil liberties, and this new threat will be very dangerous indeed. This is the general subject which I wish to explore.

What I have to say falls into three parts. First, I wish to review some of the salient features of our national experience with civil liberty problems down to the eve of the present war; and by experience I mean our thinking about these problems as well as our behavior with respect to them.

The ends of government may be stated as follows: (1) external security, (2) internal order, (3) justice, (4) general welfare, and (5) freedom.

To the state, which is the name usually applied to independent political associations, these ends are accorded on the basis of observation and reflection. They may be summed up under the term the “common weal,” or the common good. This assumes that there is a community, made up of human personalities, that there are purposes, values, and interests in common, that there is a commonly accepted organization for carrying out these common purposes.

It cannot be said that these functions are the property or responsibility of the state alone. They are shared by other agencies of human society, and without their coöperation the political society can do little. The state provides a broad framework within which other societies and persons may operate more effectively, and undertakes common functions which it can more conveniently carry on, than other associations.

In 1942 the Democrats elected 222 candidates to the House of Representatives, while the Republicans elected 209. It was the most successful election for the Republicans since they lost control of the House in 1930, and marked a tremendous resurgence in their power from its nadir in the 1936 election. The change in the popular vote was not great; in 1936, 41.3 per cent of the major party vote went to Republican congressmen, while in 1942 they received 51.6 per cent of the major party popular vote. Yet clearly we have been witnessing a Republican trend; and the problem of this article is to discover the basis on which it rests.

I

It is well known that the majority of people in any election vote on party lines. Yet there are always a number of people not affiliated with either major party, and a number of “mavericks” who vote for the opposition candidate. If “issues” are involved in any election, their influence can be detected only in the votes of such people. Our first analysis will be directed to discovering what national issues, if any, were involved in the 1942 congressional elections.

In a democracy, understanding is an essential ingredient of intelligent action. We the people cannot be expected to play our proper rôle in the drama unfolding before us today if we are not kept informed about the why and the how of the war. We ought to know our enemies, and their mad dream of world conquest. We ought to know our Allies and the sacrifices they are making to win a war which we could never have won without their help. We ought to know what we as individuals can do to bring our enemies to their knees more quickly. And finally, we ought to know something about the things we are fighting for. In the words of Mr. Elmer Davis, director of the Office of War Information, “This is a people's war, and to win it the people should know as much about it as they can.”

To help “facilitate the development of an informed and intelligent understanding … of the status and progress of the war effort”—according to the executive order creating the OWI—the federal government has utilized five main media: motion pictures, the press, radio, graphics, and face-to-face discussion. While reaching a more limited audience, government pamphlets have served as an invaluable sixth medium. A review of a select list of the pamphlets about the war on the world front may be of particular interest to political scientists for two reasons: (1) the publication and distribution of such pamphlets is one important phase of the wartime activities of our government; and (2) they are an excellent source of information for teachers and other community leaders upon whose shoulders has fallen much of the responsibility for keeping our people informed about the war.

Whatever the Farmer-Labor party in Minnesota may or may not have achieved during the period of its ascendancy from 1931 to 1939, it is obvious that its effectiveness was drastically impaired by its failure to control the state legislature. With the exception of 1933 and 1937, when the so-called Liberal caucus elected the speaker of the house of representatives and organized that body, the Farmer-Labor party did not have a majority in either house of the legislature. In other words, the party controlled neither the house nor the senate in the sessions of 1931 and 1935 and controlled only the house in 1933 and 1937.

Why was the party unable to control the legislature at a time when the state, by positive pluralities and majorities, was electing and re-electing Farmer-Laborites to state administrative offices? This question relates to a basic problem in representative democracy, for certainly here was a clear instance of the will of the “majority” submitting over a period of eight years to that of a “minority” among the state's voters. In 1943, the Farmer-Labor party, torn by inner strife and discredited in many quarters, had reached what appeared to be the bottom of a decline that began with an overwhelming defeat by the Republicans in the 1938 general election.

An institution is an action pattern, a social complex of interrelated habits. Members of an institution occupy habitual positions in relation to other members. The conduct of each individual moves in repetitious patterns governed, by that individual's positional relationships in the institution and by the total action pattern of the institution. These positions are defined in the organizational structure of the institution; they evolve, grow, reach an established routine as the institution becomes a stabilized pattern of social action.

An institution may have a formally integrated structure and may be in continuous activity—like a given church; or it may be a contingent pattern of action invoked only on the occurrence of specific events—as marriage or portions of the law. Administration involves both types of institution, but the most frequently observed and commonly studied is the formal structural organization.

The administration as a whole (of the Federal Government, for example), or of any well defined unit of it (as a department or independent agency), may be looked upon as an institution. In general, the form is hierarchical, necessitated by the division of labor involved, the requirements of supervision and coördination, the necessity for authority and direction. As a going concern, the administrative unit has daily, monthly, yearly patterns of action. The effectiveness with which the unit achieves its objectives depends upon the appropriateness of its organization to the functions required of it, the perfection with which its various elements are integrated into a smooth-running going concern.

A great deal has been said as to whether Hitler is really representative of the German people. Books have been written to show that he is merely the latest in a long line of German romanticists, racialists, and Pan-Germans. In most of these studies, the German people are lumped together in one mass without much differentiation. In analyzing public attitudes, however, it is desirable to be as particular and specific as possible, and to break up opinion groups into all their component parts. Therefore, without desiring to minimize the emphasis already placed on the evil influences which have had such a strong and continuing effect upon the generality of Germans and the course of their history, it is proposed here to study German political opinions district by district during a critical period. It is the purpose of this investigation to ascertain whether German voters reacted uniformly as a mass when they were presented with a crucial decision. Did the reawakening of German nationalism and Pan-Germanism by Hitler evoke a uniformly strong response throughout the length and breadth of the country, or were the German people genuinely divided in their attitude toward Nazism—the latest version of rampant German nationalism?

The Origin of Party Courts. When Hitler reëstablished the NSDAP organization in the spring of 1925, he built it up rather systematically, with several divisions to which separate tasks were assigned. The SA were the “troops,” intended for protection and order (as the Nazis saw it). The office of the Reichsschatzmeister was the finance division of the party, and the Organization Department had the job implied in its name. The Investigation and Adjustment Committees (Untersuchungs- und Schlichtungsausschüsse), briefly called USCHLA, finally, were the beginning of a now elaborate judicial system within the party, consisting of a hierarchy of local and district courts and a supreme court. As the party membership increased rapidly and the problem of its internal consolidation became pressing, the work of the USCHLA piled up. At first, the USCHLA was a rather loose organization, its members working as trusted representatives, so to speak, of the local and district party leaders each of whom had three on his staff. Their judicial competence and procedure was established for the first time in a set of Directions (Richtlinien) decreed by Hitler in August, 1929. After 1933, the Führer ordered the present Chief Party Justice, Walter Buch, to change the USCHLA into a regular party judicial system. New and amplified Directions were consequently decreed on February 2, 1934, defining the respective competences of the state and party courts, and assigning to the latter all matters affecting the party organization.

There has at various times during the war been a good deal of discussion of the advantages to be gained from interposing a “cooling-off period” between the conclusion of hostilities in the obvious sense and the formal execution of an elaborate peace treaty. During such a possibly prolonged period of armistice (or whatever else it might be called), some of the passions generated during the war, it is hoped, might be mitigated, and an opportunity given for more leisurely, and therefore more intelligent and farsighted, investigation of many of the knotty problems to which during the war busy statesmen can scarcely be expected to apply their minds.

The attractiveness of this idea is obvious enough. It would be an inestimable benefit if somehow or other we could ensure that the postwar settlement would be made by people immune from the passions and hatreds which on all sides are likely to generate clouded and distorted thinking after the war. And it is equally obvious that, even with the most careful preparation now, there will, at the conclusion of the war, still be questions of first-rate importance, about which few people whose judgment merited respect would be prepared to offer confident solutions for immediate application. And even if they had confidence in their judgments on these issues, they are unlikely during the war to make as much progress as might be desired in convincing all the parties whose coöperation will be essential for the execution of their plans of the wisdom of their views.

The Suez Canal has been regarded at times and uncritically as one of Egypt's great assets. It is so considered by many of the political leaders of Egypt, as their attitude on Canal issues bears witness. In the sense that the Suez waterway, both as a project and as an achievement, has brought the land of Egypt prominently into the world scene during the past century, it has been a factor in the trend of development of that country second in importance only to the Nile River itself. This is no indication, however, that the Canal has had a beneficent influence on Egyptian life. Actually, a careful estimate of the changes it has wrought, both economic and political, leads inescapably to the conclusion that, with respect to tangible effects, the waterway thus far has worked to the distinct disadvantage of Egypt. It is impossible to bring the intangible balance sheet to totals, but it is safe to say that an Egyptian patriot more concerned with his country's national security and a balanced budget than with its prominence in world affairs might well deplore the fact that the Canal ever progressed beyond the stage of discussion.