OCR Text |
Show Merry-Co-Round By DREW PEARSON and ROBERT 8. ALLEN (Editor's Note This week ths Brass Ring goes to ths entire state department, giving it a rough ride on The Washington Merry -Co-Round.) WASHINGTON Most important branch of the government today is the state department It is more linpuitaiil than Hie ai my uncTTlgvy-because uncTTlgvy-because its job is to keep the nation out of war. And it is more important than any of the government departments relating to economic welfare because those departments are out of luck once war breaks. uespue ins importance of the stste department, depart-ment, no government sgency in all of Washington Wash-ington is more underpaid, understaffed and worse equipped to handle the vsst responsibility responsibil-ity placed upon its shoulders. This is true even at a time when the stste depsrtment is asking for tremendously increased in-creased powers under a new neutrality act, powers which msy permit it to place the United States on one side or the other in esse of wsr. Many senators, generally sympathetic with the idea of loosening the now rigid neutrality law, hesitate to give that discretion to the stste depsrtment as it is now organized. They believe be-lieve that before Mr. Hull's csreer boys get more power, they should first show that they deserve it. Snobbish Isolation Basic trouble with the stste department goes back to two things: (1) lack of money; (2) isolation iso-lation from the U. S. A. some people call it snobbishness. The constsnt wail of the career men themselves them-selves is against the isolationist tactics of Hiram Johnson, William E. Borah and other western sens tors. They claim that the United States no longer csn remsin cut off from the world, in the isolation of its esrlier dsys. In this, Mr. Hull's boys may be right But they, in turn, commit the ssme sin. They live in virtual isolation from their fellow men. The career diplomat who has soiled his hands with manual labor, or rubbed shoulders with the grest mass of the American people, is as rare as an anti-Hitler nazi. Moreover, all the high officials of the stste department, except for Mr. Hull himself, were born, bred and reared on the Atlantic seaboard. Eastern Monopoly Cslling the role of the state department's top-notch executives, Sumner Welles, under-secretsry under-secretsry of stste, is from New' York and Maryland; Assistant Secretary Adolf Berle is from New York; Francis Sayre from Pennsylvania Pennsyl-vania and Boston; George Messersmith from Delaware; Walton Moore, counselor of the department, de-partment, is from Virginis; Jimmy Dunn, political po-litical adviser, is from Newark, N. J., and Stanley Hornbeck, another political adviser, is from Massachusetts. Of the men who really determine Americsn foreign policy, not one comes from west of the Allegheny mountains, and it is even rare when one of them goes as fsr west as Pittsburgh or Chicago to deliver a speech on U. S. foreign policy. The state department might take lesson from one of the nstion's lsrgest press associations, associa-tions, which employs midwestern newspaper men because most of its clients are in the west It doestthis on the theory that a midwestern newspsper man living in the east understands whst his home town newspapers want to print , Fenny-Pinehlng Second major cause of state department inefficiency is lsck of money. Why this should be so only Cordell Hull and the inner diplomatic diplo-matic circle know. With billions being 'spent for relief, rearmament and agriculture, a few extra millions might be spent on the brsnch of the government charged with keeping the nation na-tion out of war. Instead, the state department is receiving only $17,000 000, compared with $553,000,000 for the army and $616,000,000 for the navy. And of that $17,000,000, the state department raises $4,000,000 itself in consular and passport fees. In fsct while every other government department de-partment has been resching its hand into the treasury, the stste department actually is getting get-ting $1000.000 less than it did in Hoover's dsy when its 1932 budget was $19,000,000. Some of the isolationist senators hsve even told stste department officials thst their present budget was equivalent to penny-pinching st the expense of nstionsl ssfety, and that they could hsve any reasonable increase. Yet the state department does nothing. Its budget this yesr is $1,000,000 less than last Rich Man's Club ' . Only a few years sgo it wss an established fact that the career boys wsnted to keep sal-aries sal-aries low so that the state department for a long time a rich man's club, would be accessible acces-sible only to those with a private income Moat people have thought that those dsys were over. However, this still msy be the mystery mys-tery behind the state department's continued insistence thst its young men live abroad on what would be starvation salaries if they did not have private means, and in circumstances where they must do a large amount of entertaining. enter-taining. , All of this is making several senators think twice before they vote for increased state department de-partment discretion under a new neutrality bill. They argue that in time of war, both the army and the navy expand their forces, bringing bring-ing in the best executives that business can produce. But for the state department, the time of greatest need is just before the wsr clouds break in other words, today. And in the present pres-ent period of tension, this all-important branch of the government is understaffed, underpaid, bringing in no new blood, content to sit tight while the world snd perhsps also- the United States drifts steadily toward war. Distributed by United Feature Syndicate, Inc. |