National Affairs: As Lincoln Said . . .

The President talked a good war when he got back to Washington after his talks with Churchill.

Opening Volume I of Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The War Years to page 553, he read the assembled newspapermen what the Emancipator said to Mary Livermore, the Civil War reformer and social worker who visited him for a word of cheer and comfort after one of the war’s bloodiest battles, Antietam:

“I have no word of encouragement to give. The military situation is far from bright; and the country knows it as well as I do. . . .

“The fact is the people have not yet made up their minds that we are at war. . . . They have not buckled down to the determination to fight this war through; for they have got the idea into their heads that we are going to get out of this fix somehow by strategy! That’s the word—strategy! . . .

“They have no idea that the war is to be carried on and put through by hard, tough fighting, that it will hurt somebody; and no headway is going to be made while this delusion lasts.”

To the U.S. press Mr. Roosevelt gave a free headline: “President Quotes Lincoln and Draws Parallel.” Many a U.S. newspaper used the headline; and the New York (tabloid) Daily Mirror decided to give Mr. Roosevelt a check for a tyro head-writer’s daily pay, sent him $5.94, deducting 6¢ for Social Security tax.

Next day Mr. Roosevelt, who more than anyone else has fostered the 1941 U.S. idea that World War II can be won by strategy—his preferred strategy being to arm and feed Great Britain, Russia, China, while keeping the U.S. “short of war”—turned his attention to Congress, put his critics on the spot. Said he in reporting his and Churchill’s eight-point program: “It is difficult to oppose in any major particular without automatically admitting a willingness to accept compromise with Naziism; or to agree to a world peace which would give to Naziism domination over large numbers of conquered nations.”

Next he took on “appeasers and. compromisers” in a brief blast at Isolationists, whether Democratic or Republican, in a message to the Young Democrats convention in Louisville.

Point was that the President was slugging it out with his critics. Pundit Walter Lippmann was not impressed by the new Presidential slashing.

“Listening to Mr. Roosevelt,” he said, “has been like listening to a radio station from which the announcer gives forth epoch-making news and appeals to patriotism, interspersed with advertisements for soft mattresses and efficient laxatives.”