Chapter VI: Conclusion

It may be seen that a varied assortment of situations threatening the economic interests of groups, the life and limb of the populace, or the physical integrity of the nation itself, have been defined as emergencies in the United States. The spread lies between a liquid sugar or codfish emergency and an emergency caused by the global military and ideological activities of the communist movement. The citizen of the democratic state, having weathered depression, natural disaster, agricultural, defense and war emergencies, and recognizing that by popular consensus he lives in a time of cold war emergency which may turn into a war emergency, or if lessened, may create an emergency by virtue of the threat to continued prosperity resulting from curbed defense orders, is entitled to be apprehensive.

The variety is so great, the invocation of emergency so ready that one must ask whether the term is not becoming shorn of meaning--a shibboleth for the legitimization of ordinarily suspect governmental action desired by influential groups. Shibboleth or not, the individual citizen, as we shall see subsequently, finds that its incantation is associated with increasing constrictions upon his freedom of action.