The Home Journal

Governors Cool
to Ike's Plans

Pres. Eisenhower's recent proposal to 48 governors assembled in convention that a greater number of what have been federal responsibilities should be returned to the states has been so coolly received that that proposal may already be regarded as having been put in the deep freeze.

With scarcely notable exceptions, the governors were not impressed. As professional politicians themselves, many of them frankly suspected Eisenhower's idea of being politically motivated.

It would be very convenient for a party and a President under heavy conservative fire for high spending to unload some of the responsibilities on the states. If the states then failed to meet their responsibilities, say, for additional school construction, then the fault would not lie at the door of the White House.

But the primary opposition to the President's superficially fair-sounding suggestion came from governors who know from painful experience what Eisenhower does not seem to know, that most state governments are bad governments.

Gov. Leader of Pennsylvania was particularly outspoken. Calling state governments "the least effective and least good of governing units of the country," Leader said:

"It is inconceivable that the states will be given more to do until they do better than they are doing now." Gov. Harriman of New York snapped that most state legislatures "represent acreage rather than people."

There are abundant figures to support such criticisms. Nationwide, it has been reckoned that the two-thirds of the population who live in cities elect only one-quarter of all state legislators; that the one-third who live in rural sections elect three-quarters of all state legislators.

The majority who live in cities provide most of the income of the states; the rural minority who so consistently control the state legislatures dispose of that income as they see fit.

In no other unit of government has the basic American principle of representative government failed so completely to be realized as in our state governments.

In so vast a land as the USA no one denies that state governments do have many functions to perform. But it has been simple experience, not mere wilfulness, which has taught the American people to rely increasingly on Washington.