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On June 22, the U.S. Air Force and Navy launched strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities on the orders of President Donald Trump. This act of war was conducted without a vote or authorization by Congress, an express violation of Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.
This is only the latest example of increasingly unilateral executive action in foreign policy, a destructive and illegal trend going back 75 years. But what’s bizarre is how often presidents act on their own initiative even when most lawmakers support their actions. Consider the widespread celebration from members after Israel launched its surprise attack on Iran, starting the 12-Day War. Several have been explicit that regime-change in Tehran must be the central U.S. policy goal in the region.
Conservative commentators have noted the apparent belligerence of Congress even relative to presidents who have taken unilateral action abroad. “Can you imagine what’s going to happen if Lindsey Graham puts forward an appeal to have Congress declare war against Iran, to join Israel? I don’t think there’s a zero percent chance that would pass,” Daniel McCarthy, editor of Modern Age, told Andrew Day, senior editor at The American Conservative, in an interview.
In contrast to the bloody exuberance of both the executive and the legislative branches, the American people remain loath to fund and fight yet another war in the Middle East. At the start, solid majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents opposed war with Iran. Even after U.S. involvement proved momentary and Republicans predictably rallied around Trump’s decision, a majority of Americans still opposed the bombing raid.
What if instead of war powers becoming concentrated in a single office, or even returned back to legislators, they were democratized? If the American people collectively chose when our country went to war, would that ensure peace? The antiwar movement of the 1930s answered yes and, as a result, made an idealistic but ultimately futile effort to pass the Ludlow amendment.
Louis Ludlow, a self-described “Hoosier born and bred,” was an author and correspondent for Indiana and Ohio papers who became president of the National Press Club in 1927. Ludlow is one of the few examples of someone successfully maneuvering from the press gallery down to the floor; he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1928.
A progressive Democrat, Ludlow sponsored anti-lynching legislation and throughout the next decade introduced a rudimentary Equal Rights Amendment drafted by the National League of Women Voters. But responding negatively to the schoolmarm globalism of Woodrow Wilson, in 1924 Ludlow described himself as a “Democrat nationally and a Republican internationally.”
That commitment to non-interventionism abroad—a sentiment more commonly found among Republicans than Democrats at the time—inspired the proposed constitutional reform that bore his name.
The Ludlow Amendment was a two-part constitutional amendment that would have radically shifted responsibility for American foreign policy from Congress to the people. Section 1 stated that unless the United States was attacked or invaded, Congress could not declare war without a majority vote in a nationally held referendum. Section 2 necessitated that after war was declared through this method, all property necessary to wage war such as yards, factories, supplies, and even employees would be conscripted by the government (with a reimbursal rate to private owners not exceeding 4 percent of the tax value).
“The second section curbs the activities of those who encourage and create wars for financial profit,” Ludlow explained. He was deeply affected by the U.S. Senate’s investigation of munitions manufacturers and whether their influence contributed to the Wilson administration’s decision to enter the First World War.
“On reading these hearings one has a sense of utter shame that there are creatures who call themselves business men who are such strangers to the common impulses of humanity that they eagerly, by bribery and chicanery whenever necessary, promote wars to slaughter their fellow beings for the sake of filthy dollars,” Ludlow continued, even comparing their behavior to Judas’ betrayal of Christ for 30 pieces of silver.
Ludlow trusted the mass of the people to be less influenced by lobbies, hysteria, and war propaganda than the handful of politicians in Washington. “It is unfair to expect the Members of Congress, after all of the atmosphere of war has been created, to resist the terrific pressure and propaganda for war, thus subjecting themselves to the taunts and charges of treason that are always hurled at those who do not go along with the leaders in such circumstances.”
“This most vital of all questions should be decided not by the agent but by the principal, and in this case the principal is the 127,000,000 people who comprise the American nation,” Ludlow said. During a national radio address, he pointed out the incongruity of what did and did not require democratic input: “You can cast your ballot for a constable or a dogcatcher but you have absolutely nothing to say about a declaration of war.”
Even his early perspective on feminism contributed to his arguments. “Women go down into the valley of the shadow of death to bring our boys into the world. Why should they not have something to say as to whether their flesh and blood shall be hurled into the hell of a foreign conflict?” Ludlow asked, observing that out of 531 members of Congress at the time, only six were women, so letting all Americans, women as well as men, vote on declarations of war would equalize the genders.
Democratizing war powers wasn’t an idea original to the Hoosier reporter. In prior decades, similar concepts had been supported by Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan and Senator Robert La Follette Sr. A 1935 Gallup poll found that 75 percent of respondents supported the Ludlow Amendment.
Supporters maintained that with modern communication tools and transportation, a referendum could be planned, counted, and completed in a matter of days. Oswald Garrison Villard, a progressive journalist and editor, wrote in December 1937—a full four years before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—that, if Japan decided to sink the entire U.S. Pacific fleet, “we should have plenty of time to mobilize and to await the taking of the referendum on whether the American people wish to plunge the country into war to avenge the loss of those ships.”
Ludlow’s supporters included former Secretary of State Frank Kellogg, the Young Democrats of America, the American War Mothers, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the American Federation of Teachers, and the railroad labor unions.
Among soldiers, the amendment was endorsed by the retired Major General Smedley Butler, whose battlefield exploits and public advocacy had earned him legendary status, and the retired Major General William C. Rivers, who had served as Inspector General of the U.S. Army. Rivers, who chaired a coordinating committee on the issue, said, “The people of this country undoubtedly are opposed to foreign war. A war referendum would not only give the people complete control over policies that lead to war, but the effect of the people having the right to vote on war would make any administration more hesitant to follow a line of policy likely to result in a war situation.”
Originally introduced in 1935, Ludlow (through months of tireless gladhanding) received a three-hour hearing on the amendment in a Judiciary subcommittee. It was clear, however, Democratic leadership was not going to bring it to a vote. Undeterred, Ludlow began collecting signatures for a discharge petition to bring the measure to the House floor. (He also dropped section two and war material confiscation to expand its base of support.)
After a renewed public campaign in the fall of 1937—an October Gallup poll found 73 percent of respondents believed Congress should obtain popular approval by the people before declaring war—in December the discharge petition finally gathered enough signatures to ensure a floor vote at the start of the next session. This achievement coincided with a foreign policy crisis which spotlighted the war powers debate.
In July 1937, Imperial Japan invaded mainland China, opening the first theater of what would eventually develop into the Second World War. Secretary of State Cordell Hull urged any Americans in China to evacuate for their own safety, and in a major address President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signaled the administration’s turn toward a renewed internationalism.
“When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease,” FDR counseled in the “Quarantine Speech.”
On December 12, the USS Panay, a river gunboat, was carrying American civilians and embassy staff while escorting three Standard Oil tankers down the Yangtze River and away from Nanjing, just as the infamous massacre of the city was about to begin.
Despite prominently flying the American flag, the little flotilla was attacked by Japanese bombers and fighter planes, which sank the USS Panay and machine gunned the lifeboats; one American and an unknown number of Chinese were killed. The Japanese government claimed responsibility but pleaded mistaken identity, an excuse refuted by all available information. (British ships were attacked by the same Japanese pilots the same day.)
Roosevelt and Hull discussed with the British ambassador in Washington the possibility of a joint American-British blockade of Japan, and presented the idea at a cabinet meeting. The United States needed a “technique of fighting without declaring war,” Roosevelt explained. “We want to be as smart as Japan and as Italy. We want to do it in a modern way.”
But instead of instilling belligerency and a desire for retribution among the American public, the Panay incident had the opposite effect. The unyielding Senator William Borah, lion of Republican nationalists, announced, “I am not prepared to vote to send our boys into the Orient because a boat was sunk which was traveling in a dangerous zone.” The public agreed, and Gallup reported in January that 70 percent of respondents favored a complete military withdrawal from China.
The White House shelved the blockade idea, with Ludlow and co. none the wiser, and Japan eventually issued an apology with financial compensation. But following the sinking of the Panay and the deterioration of the international situation, the Roosevelt administration and its allies came down hard to squash Ludlow’s amendment, which in his memoirs Hull referred to as a “disastrous move toward the most rigid form of isolationism.”
(Ironically, the loyal Democrat Ludlow had referred to Hull a year earlier as “one of the most clear-thinking, sound-thinking statesmen in the world today.”)
The opening salvo was fired by Henry L. Stimson, an elder Republican and former secretary of state who would later serve as FDR’s secretary of war for the duration of World War II. In an extensive letter to the New York Times, Stimson claimed that a national referendum “would not only revolutionize and destroy our existing plan for national defense but it would, under the conditions of modern warfare, make any system of national defense much less effective if not almost impossible.”
Stimson appealed to expertise. When we submit ourselves to major surgery, he wrote, we don’t “hold a popular referendum among our friends and count noses on the subject.” Instead, “we leave the question to the most responsible and expert surgeon we can find … trusting in his abundant experience and in the exercise of his proved fidelity and character.” That meant trusting members of Congress and the president’s cabinet to know their profession and lending confidence to their conclusions in foreign affairs, including when to make war.
Further, Stimson objected to the desire “to draw a line at the geographical boundaries of our territory and to prescribe that our defense shall not begin until an enemy reaches that line.” He believed that narrow perspective to be “so untrue as to be fantastic. It entirely ignores the power and speed of modern air and naval attack, as well as the fragility of our modern urban construction and economic organization.”
His fellow Republican Alf Landon, the presidential nominee whom Roosevelt had just defeated in the largest landslide in American history, agreed and telegraphed the White House about his shared opposition to the referendum idea.
Ludlow’s effort was opposed by both the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion, whose national commander also wrote a letter in opposition. (Individual legionnaire posts had endorsed the amendment previously.)
The media response was withering. The New York Herald Tribune wrote, “It is no less a lunatic proposal!” The Chicago Daily News labeled it “an idea that could be harbored only by persons utterly ignorant of the realities of international life and death."
The amendment was also opposed, in varying levels of vitriol, by the the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Rocky Mountain News, the Seattle Times, the Star Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Birmingham News, the Salt Lake City Tribune, the Louisville Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the Daily Worker (official newspaper of the Communist Party).
The only two newspapers of significance which weren’t in outright opposition were the Des Moines Register (reliably non-interventionist) and the Indianapolis Star, where Ludlow previously worked as a correspondent. Even the latter was pessimistic. “He may not attain his goal of a constitutional amendment, but many a Congressman would not have gone as far as he has,” their editorial read.
The measure did have its supporters. The eccentric William Langer of North Dakota addressed telegrams to his fellow 47 governors urging them to come out in support of the amendment. In the U.S. Senate, Ludlow had many allies, prominent among them Gerald Nye of North Dakota, Arthur Capper of Kansas, and Robert La Follete Jr. of Wisconsin. But he also had critics.
Senator Clyde Herring of Iowa, a fellow Democrat, thought the idea of a war referendum undercut the entire concept of representative government. “This proposal presupposes that the elected representatives of the people are not sound, well-balanced legislators. If the people haven’t faith in us, they should remove us from office. It would be a calamity to hamstring Congress. Why elect representatives and make them powerless on important issues?” he asked.
Michigan’s Senator Arthur Vandenberg, namesake of the neoconservative Vandenberg Coalition, said the idea of holding a public referendum before going to war “would be as sensible to require a town meeting before permitting the fire department to face a blaze.” Today, Vandenberg’s words are the most commonly invoked dismissal of Ludlow’s project.
But they did not go unanswered at the time. During the House debate, the scrappy Illinois Congressman Everett Dirken, who would later go on to Republican leadership in the Senate, replied, “God save such an inept metaphor, to persuade and influence the people of this country. If [Vandenberg] had said it is calling a meeting of the fire department in the town to see whether or not they should impress civilians into duty for the purpose of putting out a fire in a town over in another country, that would have been far more apt.”
During the vote on January 10, 1938, the administration dropped the final hammer. Speaker of the House William Bankhead stood and read a letter from the president, a highly unusual practice. Roosevelt called Ludlow’s amendment “impracticable in its application and incompatible with our representative form of government.” And if passed it “would cripple any President in his conduct of our foreign relations, and it would encourage other nations to believe that they could violate American rights with impunity.”
What may have been even more impactful than the public instruction from on-high was the pressure applied behind the scenes. James Farley, postmaster general and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, personally called 110 House members who had signed the discharge petition (78 answered) and threatened to cut off all political patronage to their home districts if they didn’t reverse course.
In the end, the motion to bring the Ludlow amendment out of committee failed by a vote of 209 to 188, in what proved to be the high-water mark of the war referendum concept. The party breakdown was 111 Democrats, 64 Republicans, and 13 Progressives/Farmer-Laborites in favor, and 188 Democrats and 21 Republicans opposed. Representatives from the Midwest and Plain states supported the amendment by a 2–1 ratio, while three quarters of its opponents came from New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and the South.
The White House claimed victory, but “so many votes cast for such a drastic measure attested the strength of isolationist sentiment,” writes historian John Milton Cooper Jr. While a two-thirds majority is required for constitutional amendments, a switch of only 11 votes would have brought humiliation for FDR and hypercharged the grassroots of Middle America at the start of the “Great Debate.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt would work the next two years to manipulate public opinion towards supporting U.S. involvement in the Second World War. In the end, even after Pearl Harbor, he still requested a declaration of war from Congress—the last one we’ve ever had.
After two decades in office, Louis Ludlow retired in 1948. With the birth of the atomic age, he acknowledged it was “now too late for war referendums,” and lamented “that the death of the resolution was one of the tragedies of all time.” Two decades later, Louisiana’s Democratic Rep. John Rarick, an Indiana native who came of age during Ludlow’s tenure, reintroduced the amendment during the Vietnam War to naught response.
Whether or not decentralizing war powers to a popular vote would be practical or advisable today, it’s undeniable that there’s a serious disjunction between the desires of the American people in foreign policy and the priorities of the U.S. government. And it’s not unreasonable to lean on the wisdom of a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “In the last analysis, the people can be trusted.”