Foreign News: Who’s for War?

Biggest headache to foreign statesmen is trying to figure out what Americans think of them and the wars they are thinking of fighting.

The latest Gallup sounding of U. S. public opinion showed that 44 out of 100 people believe there will be a general European war this year. Fifty-seven out of 100 believe the U. S. will be in it. FORTUNE polls of 1935 and 1938 showed that between those years the U. S. had developed a sudden and violent dislike for Japan and Germany. The Germans, who were disliked by only 17.3% of the people in 1935, were disliked by 30% in 1938. If the U. S. does go to war at all, then, it will be to scotch the dictators.

But the public opinion that the U. S. verges on war on the side of the democracies against the dictators does not mean that the U. S. wants to goto war. On the question of whether the U. S. should remain neutral in another European War, 69% of the Gallup questionees voted yes and 95% would not “go into another such war as 1917.” The evidence therefore indicates that while practically nobody in the U. S. wants to fight, one man out of two thinks he will have to and one out of three has a good idea whom it will be against.

Two Camps. If almost nobody in the U. S. wants war, almost nobody in the U. S. as of February 1939 wants to be unprepared for it. Said Pundit Walter Lippmann last week: “There is no responsible party which thinks the United States can afford to be weak in a world where all other nations are armed to the teeth.”

On the questions of what to do with the arms it is now buying, how to scotch the dictators and maintain peace at the same time, the U. S. was divided last week into two camps about as follows: 1) those who believe that the dictators cannot live forever and that anyhow Europe had best be left to take care of itself—they want a big stick just in case, and 2) those who want to stand up on top of the barricade, shake the stick in such an unequivocal manner that the dictators will mend their ways (see p. 14).

In Camp No. 1 are the isolationists like Senator Hiram Johnson who nearly five years ago framed and got passed the legislation which makes it impossible for a nation which is in default on its debts to the U. S. (i.e., nearly all of Europe) to borrow any more U. S. money, and the drafters of the 1937 Neutrality Act which prohibits sales to belligerents other than on a dockside cash & carry basis. This camp also includes such public spokesmen as Mr. Herbert Hoover, Senator “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina, who is suspicious of all foreigners, and Senator Bob Reynolds of North Carolina who wears a feather in his hat to show that he is against all isms but Americanism.

Camp No. 2 shelters liberals who are for spanking the dictators with petitions and boycotts, as are practically all U. S. Jews, many militant Christians and that girlish-voiced Cassandra, Miss Dorothy Thompson, as well as Communists hewing to the Party line. The U. S. President also belongs to Camp No. 2 and, although he protests that he stands with George Washington against foreign entanglements, is doing all he can to arm the European democracies as well as the U. S.* The scrappiest member of this camp is not the President, however, but the President’s wife, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt, who declared three weeks ago: “I am not sure that it is always right to be safe.”

With nobody in either camp unreservedly for war, but plenty of war talk ringing through the land, this week two slim but articulate volumes by best-selling public thinkers hit the bookstalls. Each is released by the same publisher, Harcourt, Brace & Co., and the company is due to lose no money by the fact that each speaks the will of an opposing camp.

Chase’s Front. Mr. Stuart Chase, who has progressed from conservation to semantics to world politics, has digested all the best arguments for isolationism and illustrated them with a new stunt in The New Western Front ($1.50). The Europeans will always fight, he argues, so long as they are divided into 28 nations, and he sharpens his point picturesquely by dividing the U. S. into 20 governments—with Delta fearsomely protecting the Mississippi River corridor that splits resentful Blue Grass, with Yellowstone desperately trying to solve the financial muddle of three kinds of sponduliks.

He not only believes that the U. S. can and should be economically and commercially self-contained, but that by applying modern technology most other countries on earth can and should be also. An adequate navy, a standing army of 220,000 and two big oceans are Mr. Chase’s final recommendations for peace for the U. S. through Super-Isolationism.

Mumford’s Action. The fugleman for Camp No. 2 is Lewis Mumford. Famed U. S. critic and social planner, he in his Men Must Act ($1.50) declared with much emotion and not a little practicality for a plan to stymie the dictators first, then lick them if necessary.

To Author Mumford, Fascism is an “invention of the weak and neurotic” based on the riot act. “Without the cowardly aid of the more civilized nations of the world, Fascism could neither extend its conquests nor even stabilize its domestic regime.”

The U. S. is the only country which can today actively resist Fascism, says Mr. Mumford, and it should be prepared to “accept the challenge of democratic leadership.” He recommends, first of all, noncooperation with the “exploiting classes in England and France in their policy of appeasing Fascism.” Says he: “To cooperate with a Chamberlain is to invite upon our own heads a betrayal similar to that which Czechoslovakia encountered. . . .”

As a first step in fighting Fascism, Author Mumford recommends non-intercourse with dictatorships—withdrawal of U. S. nationals from Germany, Italy, Japan; liquidation of all investments there; a complete embargo on all trade with those countries, including U. S. tourist trade.

If war comes, the U. S. should make sure that it is not fighting for “shabby nationalist and imperialist ends.” The U. S. Navy should convoy munitions to the democracies. The munitions should be furnished gratis. U. S. military power should be kept intact if possible so that, at the end, the U. S. could dictate the peace by placing its weight on the “side of a permanent organization of peace, based upon an equitable distribution of economic and political opportunities for all peoples.”

But warlike as he sounded, Mr. Mumford, like the rest of the U. S., could hardly be said to have raised a battle cry.

*This week the Livorno Telegrafo, owned by the family of Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, declared that a small “Anglo-Saxonminority” in the U. S. was trying to push “the great amorphous mass of theAmerican People” into war. “Solicited by the Western democracies throughtheir Ambassadors at Washington, pushed on by the Jews for whom it has always shown a weakness, and spurred on by men who belong to a race of war preachers like Roosevelt, this minority has started getting excited again, shouting inevitablyfot America’s intervention in Europe to ‘make the world safe for democracy.’ “