JAPAN: Appeasement

Burly, unconventional, democratic Publisher Joseph Medill Patterson of New York’s Daily News has for a long time urged on his 1,950,000 New York readers a preparedness slogan: Two Ships For One. Editor Patterson was very worried about how to defend the U. S. Atlantic Coast while the Fleet stayed in the Pacific to watch Japan.

Last week it all came clear to Captain Joe. And the person who made it clear was his elegant, conventional, unsocial cousin, Publisher Robert Rutherford Mc-Cormick of the Chicago Tribune. Cousins Bertie and Joe have seldom agreed on editorial policy. In the last two elections, the News boomed Roosevelt, the Tribune booed him; later the News talked up the New Deal, the Tribune screamed it down. When the Tribune editorialized in favor of appeasing Japan last fortnight, no one dreamed the News would agree. But Colonel Bertie’s title caught Captain Joe’s eye: HOW TO DOUBLE THE FLEET IN A WEEK.

In the most sudden and spectacular editorial turnabout of the year, Captain Patterson ran these words: “Might it not be intelligent for this Government to warm up to Japan? . . . The United States may be able to help China more effectively by being polite to Japan than by persistently hurling threats. . . . We may drive Japan into the German-Italian camp. That would make Japan more dangerous to us than it now is. If Hitler should win the war, and especially if he should grab the British Navy as one of the spoils of such a victory, we might easily find ourselves menaced with urgent trouble in the

Atlantic and the Pacific at the same time.

. . . We would gain a powerful friend in the Far East, and would in effect double the strength of our Fleet.” Japan likes the U. S. very much. Japan admires nearly everything about the U. S., from baseball to horn-rimmed glasses. Ja pan leaps like a hungry carp at every crumb of friendship the U. S. tosses onto the Pacific. When the President decided to send the ashes of Ambassador Saito home to Japan in the U. S. S. Astoria last year, Japanese almost buried Ambassador Grew’s home in presents. It took only a few days, last week, for Japan to react to the new U. S. wave of appeasement.

In Washington the Japanese Embassy announced that Japanese envoys to North, Central and South America would meet in Washington this week “to discuss the improvement of trade.” The Embassy spokesman underlined press reports from Shanghai to the effect that Japanese in that city had overnight turned honey-sweet towards U. S. citizens: suddenly granted Yangtze River passes which had been refused for nearly three months, suddenly paid war-damage claims which had been outstanding for nearly three years.