THE CRISIS: Fever Chart

Somewhere, but I knew not where—somehow, but I knew not how—by some beings, but I knew not by whom—a battle, a strife, an agony . . . was evolving. . . . I had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. … I had the power, if I could raise myself to will it; and yet … I lay inactive. . . .

So De Quincey described his sensations when he had taken too much opium. He might also have been describing the sensations of many a U.S. citizen last week.

For two years the U.S. has heard, in vast doses of oratory, that it could beat Hitler without fighting him. Now somewhere a mighty battle was raging, somewhere in some unreal thicket of unpronounceable names somewhere in the suburbs of Moscow. Each day the great armies clashed and retreated, were encircled, imprisoned, wiped out, again .encircled, again wiped out; each day innumerable unreal tanks were destroyed, attacked again, again destroyed; each day 100 airplanes were shot down, flew over again, were again shot down. Each day the Germans advanced, the defense stiffened, finally the Government fled.

Somehow, but Americans knew not how, the fate of the U.S. was involved in this ghostly contest. Some time, though they knew not when, Hitler’s triumphs were to stop, the unrest of the conquered countries was to grow, U.S. supplies to invaded countries would be enough, and the Nazis would go down. By some means, though they knew not what they were, the daily round of their own familiar U.S. life was made uneasy by the outcome.

Last week every nation faced a crisis, but none faced a crisis so complicated and peculiar as that of the U.S. It was no crisis akin to the violent one in Moscow, to the Cabinet overturn in Tokyo, to the tension in London; it was more nearly akin to the crisis of a fever, when the hearing is confused, the mind wanders, and fitful and disjointed images fill the brain. For the Nazis the advance on Mos cow was simple—this was the sixteenth time in two years they were moving upon the capital of another country. For the conquered countries of Europe it was equally simple—if Moscow falls it will be the sixteenth defeat, without one victory. For the Communists, the Marxists—for innumerable reformers who wanted some form of collectivism because they believed it would not only benefit mankind but also strengthen their country—the thought of the fall of Moscow brought on an intellectual crisis that drove them to retreat beyond the Ural Mountains of the mind. But for the U.S. as a whole, the biggest fact of the crisis was that it was masked and unadmitted even by those who acted to try to meet it.

Two Oceans, One War. Yet by every standard of fact, the week was a week of crisis in all but public excitement.

In three days unrelated events became related. The German hammering at Moscow and the overturn of the Japanese Cabinet foreshadowed a Japanese attack on Siberia. The attack on the destroyer Kearny and the threat of a Japanese-Russian war both raised anew the question of how the U.S. is to get aid to the enemies of Hitler—a question that involves the failure of the U.S. Neutrality Act.*

The fate of Russia appeared to depend on the U.S. keeping open the supply line to Vladivostok. If Russia capitulated or went down in defeat, Hitler would reach the borders of China; Japan, the shores of Siberia; and the Axis would be in a position to seize Africa (see p. jo). Nobody was clairvoyant enough to visualize all the possibilities, but one thing was clear. The U.S. could not make separate decisions in the Atlantic and the Pacific. The war in the East and the war in the West were one. It was now plain that the U.S. could count on no other country to do her fighting for her. Henceforth the U.S. would have to decide and act for herself.

Prelude to Decision. No word of world crisis yet came from the President. Resting during a long weekend at Hyde Park, the President spent his time planning to convert some swampland to truck farming. He entertained Crown Princess Martha of Norway, postponed his return to Washington when the weather cleared. With an almost ostentatious disregard of the news he spent the Sunday morning with members of the Chapel Corners Grange, although the mission from Moscow had been on hand a full day. Averell Harriman, keeping to the tempo of the time, flew from Moscow to London, broadcast a breathless speech of confidence in Russia, flew to the U.S. in a U.S. Navy patrol bomber, raced to his home in Harriman, N.Y., 35 miles from Hyde Park. Harry Hopkins ran back and forth. But the President let more than 48 hours pass before he settled down to hear Harriman at first hand.

No feeling of world crisis yet came to the nation.

Looking up from the unreal war news in his paper, a citizen could turn up images of U.S. life as disjointed as the visions of a fever: a 16-year-old boy, running away with two girls, 15 and 14, confessed killing a North Carolina carpenter because he wanted his automobile . . . in Raleigh, N.C., an obstreperous elephant, being put out of its misery, refused to die, sagged on its legs for 40 minutes while a prison warden pumped over 100 shots into it with a submachine gun . . . in Boston, showgirls demonstrated the V for Victory campaign and, incidentally, the unreality of the nation’s feeling about the war, by posing in V costumes for the press (see cut, p. 18) . . . in Boston, Mrs. Roosevelt, preparing her radio talk, found herself shocked at the immorality of the Nazi doctrine that German girls should have babies by German soldiers whether they were married or not. . . .

The U.S. may well have been enjoying the last days of its phony war as Britain did before Norway.

The last of the great State fairs of the season opened in Shreveport, La., with all attendance records broken from Minne sota to Texas. The farmers were better dressed and had more money to spend; the exhibits of farm machinery were bigger & better than ever. At Dallas the farmers, getting $100 a bale for their cotton, worried about the shortage of farm labor next year, wandered through five acres of farm machinery: green and yellow John Deere harvesters, bright red International Harvester caterpillars, the sleek slate grey of Ford Ferguson tractors. But of farm equipment, there is already a grave shortage of repair parts, dealers would not promise deliveries, and in Washington Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard was pleading in vain for priorities for farm machinery.

No social historian could link the innu merable frustrations and half-accomplishments of U.S. life with the mood of the people about the war. No publicist was powerful enough to relate the infinite, anonymous mass of individual difficulties with the upheavals of the times. A year ago last June, on the beach at Dunkirk, the democracies had a shock which gave men everywhere their first real sense of the seriousness of the war. That feeling did not endure. Last week, with Russia battered to a bloody pulp, with Japan on the brink of another war, with the U.S. facing the decision of fighting in both oceans, the democracies were close to another shock as sobering as Dunkirk—a new realization that World War II was serious business.

But as the Nazis reached Moscow, Congress was debating repeal or amendment of the Neutrality Act, just as it had been debating it two years ago when the war began. Senator Tom Connally was denouncing the Nazis on the torpedoing of the Kearny: “This murderous and foul crime must be avenged”; Secretary Hull was saying again that this act proved Hitler’s plan for world domination. The President was still being cagey, and Alf Landon was still warning about collectivism in the New Deal. Martin Dies was still finding Communists in innumerable Government agencies.

Nowhere in the democratic world were there signs of imagination or just plain capacity to match the mad audacity of Hitler. The U.S., like a man coming out of an opium dream, had barely waked up to the knowledge that it could not count on anybody else to fight its battles, that it had to achieve its own survival.

* If Japan formally declares war on Russia, Franklin Roosevelt, unless he finds some evasion, would be obliged by the Neutrality Act to stop shipments to Vladivostok, even if the Japanese Navy did not interfere.