MISSOURI WATCH: LOOKING FOR CLUES IN THE PAST

No aphorism in the English language is so clearly a canard as the widely quoted words of Baron Acton that power tends to corrupt. It is just not true. Power is morally neutral. It lends itself to use for good equally as well as for evil. No positive gains can ever be made in social organization without a power base from which to launch them, be it religious, political, economic or military.

As to the follow-up quotation that absolute power corrupts absolutely, how can humans know? The heavens hold absolute power, but humans never. All human empowerment is limited, and most often, only temporary. Consider the world's historically great military powers, and then consider their relatively short tenure, and even during the height of their power, these so-called ruling nations could exert only so much strength and it was far from absolute, and always temporary.

Before applying these homilies to how last month's election affects national policy and federal governance, I add a moralism of my own. Not the holding of power, but a felt lack of it, is more likely to lead to corruption. Widely felt grievances without capacity (power) to correct them present a serious threat, even violence. Consider the general unrest that has been caused in society from minorities seeking their civil rights, and placing it on an individual case, consider the willingness of aggrieved employees to embezzle funds from the very organization that employs them.

This column is surely the only commentary that will interpret the recent election in terms of Baron Acton. But the election, above all else, sets in motion a massive transfer of power. President Clinton will lose some, but how much remains to be seen. The bigger change is the shift in congressional power base from Democratic to Republican. How newly acquired power will be used by the new majority is not predetermined. The realities of governing are far different than the expectations of it, as witness the abandoned priorities of presidents and Congresses throughout our two centuries of the democratic experiment.

In the language of the second part of the Acton proverb, the power shift of 1994 is by no means absolute. The new leaders in both the House and the Senate may be overreading their authority; they hold only a narrow majority, and party loyalty is increasingly more difficult to muster, much less enforce.

After last month's returns became obvious, I sought out someone who had witnessed first-hand the last such revolution in 1946. It is one thing to view it from history and fragmented memories and still another to have lived it personally. One who did was Dr. Harold Breimyer, a professor emeritus at the University of Missouri at Columbia and before that, a ranking official in the U.S. Department of Agriculture who often provided the Truman White House with his knowledge of agricultural economics. Not only was he in Washington in 1946, he experienced the same shock as many other Washingtonians at the shift in power that had been instigated by voters 38 years ago. He notes that the question asked over and over in the nation's capital in 1946 was "How can this be?" Washington had believed the public was satisfied, even pleased with its relatively new president, a Missourian named Truman. Still, voters in Great Britain, just a few months earlier, had turned out their great wartime leader, retiring Winston Churchill from active duty.

It would be easy to overstate similarities between the immediate post-World War II era and today. Yet it is true that the 1946 vote reflected, in part, a resistance to the disciplines the great war had imposed. In 1994, citizens expressed a similar unhappiness with constraints, ranging from new environmental rules to civil rights to who-knows what.

In 1947 President Truman and Congress went into gridlock. Truman's strategy was to continue to propose legislation that he regarded as in the public interest. It's not only the president's prerogative to do this but his constitutional obligation. Congress rejected most of HST's proposals, including a national health-care system, whereupon in 1948 the testy Missourian ran against a "do-nothing Congress." Whether the candidate was completely accurate in his description of a Republican controlled legislature is certainly open to argument, for, somehow, substantive legislation was enacted.

A major legislative achievement was approval of a new General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which certainly sounds familiar today in light of congressional approval of the most recent trade treaty with the same name. That do-nothing Congress 47 years ago gave environmental programs a thrust forward as it adopted the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act and the Forest Pest Control Act.

Significant today, when a new farm law is on the congressional agenda, is the action taken relative to commodity price supports. With wartime supports expiring, payments levels were due to drop at the end of 1948 to a range of 52 to 75 percent of parity. Did the newly conservative Congress let that happen? Not on your life. A 1948 law jacked the support rate to 90 percent of parity for 1949 crops.

Can the events of 1947 and 1948 prove reliable clues as to what will happen in 1995-96? Will the 104th Congress use power in the same way the 80th did? Probably not. For one reason, Americans are in a more desultory mood today than they were in the immediate postwar years. The process of governing is more difficult today. For another, to quote many observers, Clinton is not Truman. Forty years ago, HST's colors changed. Always crusty yet conciliatory, he became combative. He won re-election and a place in history that could not have been dreamed of at the time. Democrats who seek reassurance from this portion of history seem destined for disappointment.

~Jack Stapleton is a Kennett columnist for the Southeast Missourian.