THE PRESIDENCY: New Axis?

Historians may well look back upon last week as a turning point in U. S. foreign policy. Europe’s jitters had communicated themselves to Washington so forcefully that President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Hull agreed the moment had come for another warning to Herr Hitler. Accordingly, Mr. Hull took to the air with a speech, short-waved to Europe, in which he elaborated his thesis of international “order under law.” His sharpest point: “In a smaller and smaller world it will soon no longer be possible for some nations to choose and follow the way of force and for other nations at the same time to choose and follow the way of reason. All will have to go in one direction and by one way.”

Britain and France, lawful democracies, applauded Mr. Hull’s words, Autarchic Germany snorted “moral preacher.” Autarchic Italy gave him the silent treatment. Autarchic Japan hissed: “Mr. Hull is an idealist.” But within 48 hours reactions to Mr. Hull were overshadowed by reactions to President Roosevelt.

At Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., where he went to receive an honorary D.C.L. before dedicating a new international bridge across the St. Lawrence River and its Thousand Islands (see p. 34), Franklin Roosevelt declared:

“A few days ago a whisper, fortunately untrue, raced round the world that armies standing over against each other in unhappy array were to be set in motion. . . . We in the Americas are no longer a far away continent to which the eddies of controversies beyond the seas could bring no interest or no harm. Instead, we in the Americas have become a consideration to every propaganda office and to every general staff beyond the seas. . . .

“We can assure ourselves that this hemisphere at least shall remain a strong citadel wherein civilization can flourish unimpaired. The Dominion of Canada is part of the sisterhood of the British Empire. I give to you assurance that the people of the United States will not stand idly by if domination of Canadian soil is threatened by any other empire!”

That statement, though it expressed only an obvious truism about a remote contingency, did indeed cause chatter abroad. Britain and France loudly applauded the acknowledgment of a “Washington-London-Paris” axis. Germany officially laughed it off as electioneering talk by Mr. Roosevelt. Italy sneered at the idea of a Canadian invasion “by whom?

Polar Bears?” U. S. pundits—including the State Department—solemnly noted that President Roosevelt had “extended the Monroe Doctrine to include Canada” —overlooking the facts that: 1) President Monroe’s famed message to Congress in 1823 was specifically occasioned by conversations with Imperial Russia over its Alaskan and Pacific Coast colonies: 2) referred to “the American Continents.”

These reactions served mainly to obscure a basic fact about the Hull-Roosevelt speeches. Both men, in their anonymous references to “disintegration of the structure of world order,” “international lawlessness,” “wanton brutality,” “undemocratic regimentation,” “misery inflicted on helpless peoples,” clearly and purposefully ranged Germany, Italy and Japan—where these inhumanities are practiced—as nations to whose policies the U. S. is opposed. And in so doing, both men had conscientiously quoted the U. S. people in support of their view.

Mr. Hull actually said: “The people of this country are each day more accurately visualizing the conditions which prevail.

. . . When freedom is destroyed over increasing areas . . . our most cherished political and social institutions are jeopardized. . . . Hence it is necessary that as a nation we become . . . increasingly effective in our efforts to contribute along with other peoples—always within the range of our traditional policies of non-entanglement—to the support of the only program which can . . . place the world firmly upon the one and only roadway that can lead to enduring peace and security.”

President Roosevelt, even more explicit, said: “We cannot prevent our people from having an opinion … in regard to violations of accepted individual rights. . . .

No country where thought is free can prevent every fireside and home . . . from considering the evidence for itself and rendering its own verdict . . . the national verdict. That is what we mean when we say that public opinion ultimately governs policy.”

The policy thus governed, of course, is the U. S. foreign policy, at present expressed in a rigid Neutrality Act which suggests that the U. S. is neutral in any & all wars (except those of American republics when attacked from abroad), and that the U. S. will sell submunitions of war to all-comers on a cash & carry basis at its home ports. If President Roosevelt and Mr. Hull now create a popular mandate, to align the U. S. against autarchies, revision of the Neutrality Act must be their next move.

C. Canada’s Prime Minister Mackenzie King accompanied President Roosevelt from the Queen’s University ceremonies to a ribbon marking the U. S.-Canadian border across the new Thousand Islands International Bridge. A large pair of shears was produced. Each statesman grasped one handle of this weapon and together they snipped the red. white & blue ribbon, “opened” the bridge (see cut, p. g). In his dedicatory speech. Prime Minister King rambled on amiably about bridges as symbols of international friendship. But Franklin Roosevelt had a point to make and seized the opportunity to do so. Ever since he was Governor of New York it has been his dream to assure an international arrangement for joint public development of the hydroelectric potential of the St. Lawrence River some 100 miles from where it pours out of Lake Ontario.

Ever since he became President, a treaty with Canada to make his dream come true has been hanging fire.

Said he: “The most unparalleled opportunity which the river affords has not gone unnoticed by some of my friends on our side of the boundary. A conception has been emerging in the United States which is not without a certain magnificence. This is no less than the conviction that if a private group could control the outlet of the Great Lakes basin, that group would have a monopoly in the development of a territory larger than many of the great empires in history. . . .

“For that reason, when I know that the operation of uncontrolled American economic forces is slowly producing a result on the Canadian side of the border which I know very well must eventually give American groups a great influence over Canadian development, I consider it the part of a good neighbor to discuss the question frankly. . . .

“I look forward to the day when a Canadian Prime Minister and an American President can meet to dedicate, not a bridge across this water, but the very water itself, to the lasting and productive uses of their respective peoples. . . .”—C. Besides his waterway and power treaty —and a military road up through British Columbia to Alaska (TIME. Aug. 22)—President Roosevelt wanted one other thing from Canada last week: cooperation in disposing of some of this year’s bumper U. S. wheat crop in such a way as to avoid being accused of “dumping” wheat into foreign markets (see p. 41). The President’s first important caller after his return from Canada to Hyde Park: Secretary of Agriculture Wallace. Subject: the U. S. wheat surplus.

—Premier Mitchell Hepburn of Ontario, in Toronto, last week grumpily answered Franklin Roosevelt: “There can be no development of power on the St. Lawrence River without the consent of the governments concerned. There will be no consent from this government.”