STATE OF THE NATION: Last Week of Peace

In politics and meteorology it was a week of strange, unseasonable weather. Three great masses of warm air were in motion across the country. One swept inland from the Atlantic, bringing rain and fog—fog that covered the land from Maine to Florida, from Sandy Hook to the Mississippi, that grounded planes, made trains run late, and filled New York Harbor with the melancholy blare of foghorns and whistles. Another warm air mass moved from the Southwest bringing hot days to Florida, fog on the Gulf Coast, warm weather in Kansas (temperatures were ten to 15 degrees above normal). Another warm air mass moved inland from the Pacific.

The U.S. was covered with warm air and fog like a blanket—a blanket with a hole in it, for there were the usual December snows in the Colorado Rockies. All U.S. weathermen could say was: “If there is any good explanation for such weather at this time of the year, we’d like to have it.” The ancients would not have been at such a loss. They would probably have seen in it an omen of world-shaking events.

Flowers bloomed and trees budded in New York City’s December parks. In four days. 763 flights were canceled at LaGuardia Field—at the airports they said: ”Even the birds are walking.” Here & there planes, unable to come down at their scheduled stops, carried their passengers to out-of-the-way fields—at South Bend, Ind., in a few hours, 15 huge planes landed, like great ungainly birds seeking shelter.

Under the fog, under the warmth, the daily life of the U.S. went on—the same old life with its humdrum murders and routine tragedies, its drives in the country and its arguments about Roosevelt, its arrests and hot tempers—inhibited, half-sad and half-contented.

Although the whole nation had long had the sense that war was approaching, the country discarded its pre-war preoccupations slowly, regretfully, in the way that travelers across the plains were finally forced to throw away the lovely walnut bureau, the framed motto, the pictures of the graduating class, the heirlooms and excess baggage, when the going got tough. Some of the U.S. preoccupations in the week before war blotted them out:

> In Yreka, Calif., citizens of five counties “seceded” from Oregon and California, elected a Governor, held a torchlight parade, carried signs reading Our Roads Are Not Passable, Hardly Jackass-able (their grievance was that neither Oregon nor California built roads to tap their rich minerals). Conceived in the spirit of what-the-hell-is-going-on-here, and dedicated to the proposition that any publicity is good, the State of Jefferson expected no long history, but its citizens hoped to get their roads.

> Solemn Chairman Walter F. George of the Senate Finance Committee, decided that taxes are already as high as they should go. He forecast that the national debt, now about $55 billion, might reach the fantastic height of $150 billion.

> The America First Committee denied that it would form a Peace Party, but declared that it would support any political candidate who opposed Mr. Roosevelt. It announced that it would support Isolationist Joseph B. Harrington who was running in the Massachusetts primary, in the Seventh District, for a Congressional seat which death had left vacant. To his district, heavily populated by French-Canadians, Poles, Germans, Irish, Italians, Syrians, Armenians, Czechs, Candidate Harrington proclaimed: “[The] sole and only issue in the campaign is the America First policies.”

> OPM jubilantly announced that only one strike of “primary significance” was delaying the defense program: a walkout of 90 C.I.O. autoworkers at the Rausch Nut & Manufacturing Co. (nuts & bolts for airplanes).

> Every war has made profiteers, and many a Washington official is beginning to suspect that World War II will be no exception. The House Naval Affairs Committee planned early hearings on a preliminary report that some shipbuilding companies are earning up to 150% on their investments. The Office of Price Administration, investigating an unnamed defense industry, found that 86 of 88 companies earn 6% or better, half earn 42.6% and up, one earns 112%. Senator David I. Walsh predicted “an awful day of reckoning” when the U.S. public gets the figures.

> Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau declared that unless Congress gave him $4,502,554 to collect the $5 “use” tax on automobiles, which U.S. motorists are supposed to pay next year, he would ask Congress to repeal the tax.

> After having held up defense by a week’s strike in captive coal mines before he would consent to arbitration, John Lewis this week got what he asked for from the arbitration board. The arbitrators (Lewis, U.S. Steel’s Benjamin Fairless, the public’s John R. Steelman) voted 2-to-1 that the captive coal mines should sign union-shop contracts. The lone dissenter was Mr. Fairless, who nevertheless repeated his promise that his company would bow to the board’s final ruling. The other steel companies involved had also agreed in advance to accept the decision, no matter what they thought of it. In any other week, the news would have made big headlines.