The Truman Tragedy
Mr. Truman's capacity for making mistakes is apparently infinite, and the depths to which he will sink , in the ineffective pursuit of party gain bottomless. His latest broadcast announcing the removal of price controls on- meat and foreshadowing the end of all such controls in the United States demonstrates his few vices perfectly, for the depressing thing about the President is not that he makes a great variety of mistakes, but that he keeps on making the same mistakes. As usual, this one will do him no good whatever at the elections, for the Republicans can argue that meat has vanished from the American market, not because Cgngress itself originally smashed the controls, but because Mr. Truman declared his intention of put- ting the controls back, thus inducing the producers to flood the market when prices were high and starve it when prices went down again. As for the Democrats, they are to a great extent the urban consumers of meat who suffer alike from the present shortage and the coming high prices. That is the farcical element in all Mr. Truman's economic decisions—they please his Republican opponents and displease his own Democratic colleagues. But the situation also has its tragic side. Food prices in general will now give another upward heave, and wages have already shown the first signs of follow- ing them. The pathetic pretence that rents can be kept down will be as quickly removed as the earlier pretence that the wall of price control would hold after the first breaches were made in it last July. If America avoids inflation on a dangerous scale—dangerous to the whole world—it will be despite President Truman, not because of him. And if the Democrats manage by some miracle to erect any sort of control of Congress after the November elections it will be for the same reason. Mr. Truman's selection for the office of Vice- President remains President Roosevelt's greatest mistake.
Previous page
