• U.S.

WAR & PEACE: Exquisite Befuddlement

6 minute read
TIME

U. S. citizens were still arguing last week over what the war was about, and what the U. S. should do about it. Nearly everybody, it seemed, wanted to aid Britain, but nearly everybody also wanted to stay out of war. (According to Pollster Gallup’s figures, 60% of U. S. voters now want to aid Britain even at risk of war. Only 12% wanted to go to war deliberately.)

This was the uneasy background against which, this week, President Roosevelt spoke to the nation. Because he also spoke for the nation, his words had the effect of lessening the tumult. But before the President said his say, many an earnest, angry or just plain balled-up citizen said his:

> Mark Sullivan of the New York Herald Tribune, urbane dean of Washington columnists, saw the situation as a case of national split-personality—mass schizophrenia. Even this metaphorical complexity was too simple. Public opinion was not so much like a river that flows in one direction, but divides on the rock of a principle, as it was like a maelstrom. Men who wanted with all their minds to give all aid to England wanted also with all their hearts to feed Europe—which would break England’s blockade. Men who wanted to stay out of war with Germany also wanted to send the U. S. Navy to convoy shipments of war materials to England.

Labels were all mixed up. The New York Daily News went to Webster for a definition of “that shameful word, ‘appeasement,’ ” found in Webster no shade of the shame of Munich. Since Hitler and Stalin’s alliance in 1939 had set the style, there had been so many cases of ideologically strange bedfellows that the only strange thing left would be the discovery of two ideas that hadn’t slept together.

Last week brought some perfect examples of confusion twice confounded:

> William Allen White, so-called interventionist-warmonger, chairman of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, mildly defined his aims: to aid England, but not to the extent of involving the U. S. in war, not to repeal the Johnson Act, not to convoy supplies to England. Shocked at this lukewarmth, several of his committee members immediately branded his words as a shameful retreat toward isolation. Major General John F. O’Ryan resigned from the committee. In effect, the interventionist committee seemed too isolationist.

> General Robert E. Wood, so-called iso-lationist-appeaser, of the America First Committee, hailed White’s statement as sound stuff. So did Charles A. Lindbergh, who to many Americans symbolizes the narrowest isolation, the broadest appeasement. Immediately protests went up; several members resigned, complaining that the isolationist committee was getting too interventionist.

> For unknown reasons, Henry Ford and Lessing Rosenwald had quietly dropped out of the America First Committee. When one University of Notre Dame priest denounced aid to England, 15 of his colleagues wrote a letter to the New York Times condemning his stand. One hundred and seventy prominent U. S. citizens petitioned the President to aid England more. Dog-Fancier Albert Payson Terhune made a prophecy on his 68th birthday: The U. S. will get in the war this year. The Saturday Evening Post grumpily declared the Johnson Act might as well be repealed, since common sense had been. Anne Lindbergh’s book* was described by the Nation, as “most reactionary and pernicious.” Her mind was described by Louisville Courier-Journal Editor Herbert Agar as “painfully divided against itself” and as producing “some ugly examples of confused thought.” Historian Allan Nevins, writing in the New York Times, implied that “her wave of the future” was “a wave of the past.”

> Organized hastily three weeks ago in Iowa was a new isolationist group (No Foreign War Committee) headed by Verne Marshall, editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette, a dark, hard-bitten veteran of World War I and of numerous local crusades. (In 1936 Marshall and his Gazette managed to have 31 Iowa State officials indicted, and the Gazette was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for “most meritorious service to the community.” Same day the Iowa Supreme Court dismissed the indictments on technical grounds.) Marshall moved to Manhattan, took luxurious headquarters (recently Willkie’s) for his committee, at once paid $41,000 for full-page advertisements in 60 papers in 51 cities, asking for money to fight interventionists. Another ad was set for this week in 79 papers in 57 cities.

Marshall, who once described himself as a “rabble-rouser” of the first World War, planned a St. Louis mass meeting soon after Jan. 1, to be addressed by Colonel Lindbergh.

A melodramatic tinge to the Marshall confusion developed this week when Marshall, urging a peace conference of belligerents, named the U. S. spokesman he would send to it. His candidate: steely-eyed Promoter William Rhodes Davis, “mystery man,” who has made spectacularfortunes in mining, rubber, cheese and oil. In 1939, Marshall said, Davis brought back a “just and honorable peace proposal,” initialed by Davis’ friend Hermann Goring. It would have ended the war in ten days, Marshall said, but Roosevelt refused to look at it.

> One strange aspect of the multishaded argument showed itself clearly last week: the dovelike restraint of interventionist talk, the violent belligerency of isolation ists. Isolationists who attacked the “imperialist”war constantly demanded that the U. S. make imperialist seizures of Greenland, Bermuda, the Bahamas.

> Montana’s Senator Burton K. Wheeler seemed most exquisitely befuddled. He told reporters that President Roosevelt could bring about a “just peace” in Europe if he were willing, that the President could force Hitler into peace by threatening to enter the war on the British side if the peace terms weren’t “reasonable.” Senators Tydings of Maryland, Vandenberg of Michigan, McCarran of Nevada, Holt of West Virginia, Johnson of Colorado all chorused this sentiment, with bass and tenor variations. Next morning the New York Times demanded to know what they meant by “a just peace”: just to whom? To The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Poland, France, CzechoSlovakia? Walter Lippmann asked how Hitler could be trusted.

> Herbert Hoover made news by a speech with which many opposing people could agree in part if not wholly. On feeding Europe he stood with Anne Lindbergh; on the need for full and fair debate, step by step, he stood with her husband; on the need of expansion of production instead of rations, he stood with Leon Henderson and Franklin Roosevelt; on the need of planning the post-war world he came close to the “peace-without-empire” theories of Adolf A. Berle; on the need for cool judgment and sober action, he agreed with everybody.

All the world watched the U. S. whirlpool, to see what river might flow out of its settling. France had fallen before it knew what the war was about; England, taken suddenly by the throat, hadn’t had time to figure things out. The U. S., under the impression that there was still time and room to make up its mind, was arguing along as it always had: in straggling, disputative, disorderly democracy.

But when the President spoke, the U. S. began to realize that its mind was more made up than it had thought.

*THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE—Harcourt, Brace—$1 (TIME, Oct. 14).

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