GARBO AND THE CONSTITUTION

The fiery oratory of the late Huey, the persuasive accents of Father Coughlin, the four inch headlines of Hearst dailies--all have been used by critics of the New Deal in their efforts to brand Roosevelt as the destroyer of the Constitution and the antagonist of "American Institutions." And now from the haunts of Mac West and Joan Crawford comes a film purporting to present the history of the Constitution in color and sound.

At no time have opponents of Roosevelt been weaker than when they have attempted to arouse popular emotions by an appeal to the sanctity of the Constitution. Throughout the past four years blatant cartoonists have shown Roosevelt, Frankfurter, and the little hot dogs tearing the venerable document into shreds with fiendish delight. Leading editorials have stigmatized Roosevelt as trying to undermine the entire American structure of society by his measures which, they claim, reduce the constitution to a mere shred of out-worn parchment.

Such blind attacks are both stupid and futile. It is true that many of the laws enacted by the administration are of doubtful constitutional validity. In the Schecter and Panama Oil Cases the Supreme Court nullified acts which embodied some of the fundamental political principles of the current regime. But this does not lead to the necessary implications that all of the acts are invalid or that the administration is deliberately trying to submerge the Constitution.

The Constitution is neither a holy spirit of Americanism nor a sacred Ark of the Covenant. It represents a statement of fundamental principles of government which are to be applied by an agency of the government, the Supreme Court, to the changing conditions of American social and economic life. Thus, intelligent opposition to the current administration should be based on a critical examination of specific issues in the light of relative constitutional principles. Attempts to dramatize the Constitution merely cloud the fundamental issues at stake and substitute for an intellectual approach to the problem, the impassioned appeal of the demagogue.