The President at Home

It is always an effort to hack through the tangle of generalities in State of the Union speeches to get to their specific proposals. President Eisenhower's is no exception. Phrases like "encourage foreign trade while preserving legitimate domestic industries" or pleas to shore-up farm prices while recognizing the plight of housewives, show that the President, for all his vigor, maintains in January his fence-sitting habits of last fall. But enough of the specifics gleaned from his speech, plus the republican election platform, show what will be the Administration's domestic policy for the next four years.

The President has kept true to his campaign promise "not to turn back the clock" in domestic affairs. One enraptured Congressman said his speech had sounded the "death-knell of the New Deal." He was wrong. In assessing the needs of agriculture, collective bargaining, social security, and public education, the President borrowed chapter and verse from the New Deal. The industrial changes that make the New Deal an economic necessity and a political bonanza have gained, not lost, in momentum since 1932.

The only striking backsliding from the New Deal strategy is the President's reliance on the free market, instead of controls, to check inflation. And this is admittedly a gamble. Prices and wages touch the most sensitive nerve of the body politic. If this laissez-faire approach come to grief, the Administration will have to slap controls on again or tell an angry swarm of voters why.

More serious, though, is the President's seeming reluctance to push the clock forward. Many of the most pressing domestic problems, such as our decaying metropolitan housing, and lack of doctors and low-income medical care, were either ignored in his speech, or hustled off to "commissions for further study." Yet previous study, especially that of Mr. Truman's non-partisan commission on the Health Needs of the Nation, has shown that federal action in these field cannot wait. Since these problems find time an ally, stubborn adherence to present programs, without forward-looking improvements, does indeed turn back the clock for the future. Countries such as England and Scotland now regret having ignored, thirty years ago, this process of decay.

In other areas, the President's status quo is in arrears of even his party's platform, which was supposedly written by men more conservative than he. Even the famed "bushel of cels" pledged federal action toward the abolition of lynching. But the President contented himself with appeals to the higher moral instinct of bigots and distorters of franchise in hopes that they will stop their practices. The Republican platform promised statehood for Alaska, more rural electrification, votes for the District of Columbia, and a watchdog approach to monopolies. We hope that these were ideas the President had to shelve for lack of television time since the proper time for their enactment is long past due.

This is not to condemn the President's domestic statements as a whole. It was not a "reactionary" speech, as carped the "Daily Worker," nor a "mollycoddling" speech, as said certain editorialists in deep right field. But it did confirm what many had feared: that many open sores on the body of democracy will not find treatment for at least another few-years.